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EU Fusion Experiment's Financial Woes Get More Concrete
fiannaFailMan writes "An international plan to build a nuclear fusion reactor is being threatened by rising costs, delays and technical challenges. 'Emails leaked to the BBC indicate that construction costs for the experimental fusion project called Iter have more than doubled. Some scientists also believe that the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome and that the development of fusion as a commercial power source is still at least 100 years away. At a meeting in Japan on Wednesday, members of the governing Iter council will review the plans and may agree to scale back the project.' Iter will be a Tokamak device, a successor to the Joint European Torus (JET) in England. Meanwhile, an experiment in fusion by laser doesn't seem to be running into the same high profile funding problems just yet."
We're supposed to have Mr. Fusion by 2015, you know,... Of course, we were supposed to have flying cars 9 years ago, too,... ;-)
The saying has always been that "fusion is still 50 years away", for fifty years ago and recent.
Now EU has managed to make it 100 years away - it's an impressive achievement: they have managed to double the time we have to wait. Great use of money. Since fusion was only "50 years away" when we started we where actually better off before we started to build that reactor (or the scientists where to optimistic, but whats the fun in that?).
I'm interested in the work of Robert Bussard's research team, which continued after his death. Last I heard was sometime late last year, when the US military announced a continued grant to that team for their "Polywell" system. The grant suggests that the military saw something it liked in the interesting, but questionable data from Bussard's last experiments. Is there any new info on this?
Re: fusion research in general, how much of a priority do you think it should be? Is the best way to think of it, "It'll be nice if it ever works, but don't plan on it ever being closer than "40 years away"? (Or 100, now?) There is that one experiment that's been reported on lately with breathless claims that it'll achieve better than break-even energy within "a few years," right? One story from May says that the new California facility will be the one to achieve net energy gain, but suggests that it might take till 2040.
Revive the Constitution.
You're posting on Shashdot. Thats enough of an anti-mater for any girl out there.
Now anti-matter energy....that would be cool :)
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According to this article, NIF has cost $4 billion so far - almost four times the original estimate. What saved the NIF from cancellation was that its backers persuaded politicians that it was vital for Americas nuclear programme.
Science at this level is neither easy nor cheap.
The number of Slashdot stories on this has also just doubled. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/29/0511233
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
"So our two working examples of fusion generation require fission."
Um no. The sun doesn't use fission. So not at ll.
"I would think that the future of fusion generation would be a component of fission generation."
How? What? Huh?
"You can have fission on its own, you can have fission and fusion together, but you can't have fusion on its own in any way that's economical."
Nope not really and wow... I mean really wow.....
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Iter will be a Tokamak device
Good choice, since attempts with Zat'nik'tel and Tacuchnatagamuntoron devices failed.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
>We have two working examples of fusion generation, the Hydrogen Bomb that uses a fission device to jump start it and the Sun which is hugely radioactive.
Uhh, what? It's actually pretty damn easy to create fusion reactions in the labratory merely using ions and electric fields. Of course they are hugely energy negative but it's not like these are our only two examples of fusion. Also the response about the sun indicates a complete lack of understanding about the different types of radioactivity and the relation between this and fission.
It's not like we don't have a detailed understanding of how fusion works. We know there is no fundamental law barring fusion power, the issue is all about practical generation.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Wow, in the 50's it was any day now; 70's real soon now; 90's became 50 years; now 2010 we're at 100. That's a heck of a curve. In 100 years we'll be at only 200 years away!
To me 100 years sounds like a precursor argument to cutting funding.
As fusion seems to be the only single approach that is capable of solving the energy/climate/etc crisis by itself, we should be doubling the funding.
For the promised benefits, nuclear fusion research funding seems disproportionately small to me.
The EU spends way more than that on agricultural subsidies every single year. I'm probably a cultural barbarian, but I happen to think that developing fusion, even if it will take a while, is more important than subsidising French wine.
As for all those "fusion will always be 50 years away" remarks: that's what happens if you never start. ITER could have started a decade ago, if everyone hadn't been fighting over where to build it. Fusion would be ten years closer if we had somehow managed to select a piece of ground somewhere in a reasonable amount of time.
In both of those scenarios the difficulty stays constant - only perceptions change. Nothing has become harder, they've just realised that they're not as easy as they initially suspected.
It's the same as people in the 60s who thought that we'd have intelligent robot house servants and flying cars by now..
which is totally what she said
They dont mean those 100 years seriously right ? i mean look at it, 100 years ago we were happy to even have Power and just in the last 10 years much has developed. Science these days is exponential so i expect that in 100 years we have either blown ourselves up somehow or we will have really cool stuff...fusion power will be old by then ^^
A back of the envelope calculation says that a paraffin sphere with a 200m radius can absorb the energy of a 2 megaton hydrogen bomb by melting. So we build ourselves a nice strong containment vessel out of a granite mountain, fill the hole with paraffin and set off a bomb, melt paraffin, boil water for a couple of months and then repeat. There is probably a better material than paraffin, but the basic idea is the same. Just a few minor engineering issues to work out and we could have one of these suckers in production in a couple of years. Or we could just start making better use of the monster fusion reactor that is already in the neighborhood.
Far as I know there's been no progress, even in the lab, since then.
Then perhaps it is time to expand your knowledge?
We have built working toroid reactors since the 1970s. Just such a reactor, JET, is mentioned in TFA. The problem is no longer whether such a design will work. Nor is ignition the problem; we've achieved that years ago. Controlled fusion exists, here, now, in the present. This wasn't the case in the 1970s (well, there were Farnsworth fusors and H-bombs, but those are both significantly different cases).
The problem now lies in getting net energy out of it, and keeping the reaction going over long enough durations to generate useful amounts of electricity. This is indeed physically possible (see for instance the centre of the sun), it's just very challenging from a practical standpoint. The engineering hasn't caught up, in part because the number of testbeds for new designs is sharply limited. ITER is supposed to be the next such testing ground for new engineering solutions, but as you can see, it's having trouble getting political and financial backing.
Also, this "fusion has been 50 years away for the past 30 years" meme gets on my nerves. It's selective perception, and utter bullshit. People remember the promise of fusion, but forget that we were politically and financially unwilling to pay for it. The research wasn't going to just happen magically, someone needed to underwrite it.
Had we done the needed R&D decades ago, we would be decades ahead of where we are now. We didn't. You get what you put in, and in this case we put in nowhere near what we ought to have. Result is that we're behind.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
This reminds me of something Dr. Bussard said during his google talk:
"countless billions of stars in the universe all doing nuclear fusion...and not a single one of them is shaped like a donut!â
There are other promising possibilities for fusion; maybe we should be funding those, instead of the Tokamaks which cost billions upon billions, and are now 100 years away. Furthermore, even if they do work, they will never be economically viable.
Dr. Bussard's Polywell is one such approach, which thankfully, continues to be funded by the navy. If funding weren't so minimal, perhaps he would have lived long enough to see commercial fusion reactors using this concept. Even so, it looks like we should finally know whether it works within the next 1.5-2 years. Commercial reactors would follow shortly thereafter.
We have two working examples of fusion generation, the Hydrogen Bomb that uses a fission device to jump start it and the Sun which is hugely radioactive.
So our two working examples of fusion generation require fission.
It is with great dishonor that I present you with the "you fail physics forever" diploma. I wish you the best of luck on your new career as a Hollywood action and sci-fi movie writer.
Fusion is not 100 years away. It's already been achieved in JET, for example. What's 50-100 years away is a practical commercial fusion power plant with a lifetime measured in years.
In order to be practical, a fusion plant has to produce net power. ITER is expected to do that.
However, the materials issue remains. The interior of a tokamak, the "first wall", has to be able to withstand an intense neutron flux without degrading. ITER is going to be made out of stainless steel, which is fine for research; it wouldn't hold up very long in a 24x365 environment. For a commercial reactor, we don't have an ideal first wall material yet.
These cost overruns and delays over the history of the ITER program have been ridiculous. I'm not sure whether canning ITER is a good idea. Scaling it back might be, but the problem is, a new reactor needs to be significantly larger than existing ones, in order to explore a different part of the parameter space. Large = still expensive.
At this point, the most important part of the ITER program, IMO, is the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility. We need better materials.
The Navy picked up the option to fund the next step.
Now it's funded the step after that, and included a request for a proposal for it to fund the third and final step.
At the end of that step (if it all works) we have a practical first demo power plant - about 100 megawatts of fusion power out from cheap and very abundant fuel. Proof of concept, a practical design good enough to displace fossil fuel and fission power plants (and perhaps aircraft carrier and battleship engines) that can be replicated, and probably enough engineering data to design something much better.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Hi feepness!
Thanks! You've given the best description of science I've ever read. Disclaimer: I am a scientist.
Seriously. A lot of the fancy topics are interesting because they are like a foggy mountain top, you know that there must be a mountain top, but you don't know the way, and you don't know what you will find up there, and which equipment you need to take along. This makes science different from engineering, where you at least would have a map of the mountain roads and altitudes etc.
As far as funding issues goes: what did the giant banking bailout of 2009 brought us for the future? That has cost us a multi-multitude of the ITER project and that money just disappeared into oblivion. With the ITER, even if it wouldn't work out eventually, we'd still end up with the new technologies and materials that were developed to build it.
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For the record there are other Tokamak's, I believe the most advanced to date is KSTAR, which uses superconducting electromagnets, which are a critical part of ITERs design.