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."

Comments

Better get cracking!

[cashman73]

We're supposed to have Mr. Fusion by 2015, you know,... Of course, we were supposed to have flying cars 9 years ago, too,... ;-)

I am impressed

[spyfrog]

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?).

Re:I am impressed

[roc97007]

Or is it possible that since governments fund research, not solutions, that's what they're getting -- research, not solutions. Practical fusion will always be 50 years ahead, because that's what we are (inadvertently) paying scientists to say.

Re:I am impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Practical fusion will always be 50 years ahead, because that's what we are (inadvertently) paying scientists to say.

Scientist in lab: "Ha! Another positive energy run! Well, we'll just fudge the numbers so it looks like it took more energy to start the fusion than we got back. Can't jeopardize our funding..."

Nope, I don't buy it. Once fusion hits positive returns, there will be more money spent on it, to develop it to practical status. And the lab that first hits positive return will go down in history, famous forever.

Scientists working on fusion would love to succeed.

since governments fund research, not solutions, that's what they're getting -- research, not solutions.

I don't know how you can skip the research and go straight to the solution. If you know how, then please go do it for fusion, and make yourself fabulously wealthy as you solve all our long-term energy problems.

And if you don't know how, then stop bad-mouthing the fusion scientists. Kthxbye.

Re:I am impressed

[ultranova]

Commercial fusion will be "20 years away" after normal fusion. As always.

Commercial fusion - the merging of two small corporations into a single large one - is already commonplace. The problem is making it profit-positive; that is, how do you make the profits from that large corporation minus the sum of profits from the small ones be larger than the money spent on the fusion?

Commercial fission, on the other hand, is regularly used to energize in the marketplace, and is usually catalyzed by neutral parties, such as anti-trust committees. Spontaneous decay does occur, however one would be wise to avoid the particle companies thus emitted, as they tend to be irradiated with poisonous debt.

Both of these commercial power generation forms are somewhat controversial amongst some religious and philosophical groups, such as libertarians, who argue that the Limited Liability Force that governs large corporate interactions is contrary to their beliefs and thus an evil perversion of nature. Said groups would rather we'd stick with less efficient but more straightforward interactions between indivisible (except with a chainsaw) businessmen particles. Some also argue that the supply of Corporate Spin, which is a vital element of all interactions, is of limited supply and will be exhausted unless we deploy Astroturf Generators which, unfortunately, also produce and release weapon-grade bullshit into the environment. There is no known way to contain this contaminant.

Bussard

[Garrett Fox]

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.

Re:Bussard

[Jerf]

The latest Bussard fusion news, from yesterday. Fairly encouraging; it's hard to estimate exactly how successful the tests were but we can rule out total failure, I think.

I would currently place Bussard's success probability as much higher than ITER's.

Re:Bussard

[Jerf]

You obviously didn't follow the link. The experiments are being done. It's military funded and they're not telling us everything, but clearly the results were good enough to continue ramping up. (Total failure would either cancel the project or move it in some other direction. Probably the former.)

and the physics dubious (the consensus is mainly on the "it's not going to work" side, but it's not clear cut)

The only such "consensus" that I know about is from a guy who used assumptions about how electrons behave based on equations based on preconditions that do not hold; I find Bussard's response compelling. I do not trust that analysis. Bussard fusion may yet not work, but not for that reason.

Besides, the time for posturing and insulting people for examining data and coming to their own conclusions is coming to a close; experimental data is at hand. It doesn't matter what theories say will or won't work when the experiment is done.

Re:To heck with Fusion.

[Samalie]

You're posting on Shashdot. Thats enough of an anti-mater for any girl out there.

Now anti-matter energy....that would be cool :)

NIF cost overruns

[Super_Z]

Meanwhile, an experiment in fusion by laser doesn't seem to be running into the same high profile funding problems just yet."

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.

Re:Pure Fusion power generation is a pipe dream

[LWATCDR]

"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.....
 

Tokamak

[HTH NE1]

Iter will be a Tokamak device

Good choice, since attempts with Zat'nik'tel and Tacuchnatagamuntoron devices failed.

Re:Pure Fusion power generation is a pipe dream

[logicnazi]

>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.

100 Years?

[divisionbyzero]

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!

Some perspective please...

[johannesg]

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.

seriously

[dwarfenhoschi]

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 ^^

Re:100 years now

[RsG]

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.

Materials, materials, materials

[mako1138]

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.

Re:What ever happened to this?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.