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ITER Fusion Reactor Enters Existential Crisis
deglr6328 writes "The long beleaguered experimental magnetic confinement fusion reactor ITER is currently in what some are calling the worst crisis of its 25 year history. Still existing only on the paper of thousands of proposed design documents, the latest cost estimates for the superconducting behemoth are soaring to nearly 20 billion USD — roughly twice the estimates from as recently as a few years ago. Anti-nuclear environmentalist organizations have seized upon the moment as an opportunity to use the current global economic crisis as a means to push for permanently killing the project. If ITER is not built, the prospect of magnetic confinement fusion as a technique to reach thermonuclear breakeven and ignition in the laboratory would be in serious question. Meanwhile, the largest laser-driven inertial confinement fusion project, the National Ignition Facility, has demonstrated the ability to use self-generated plasma optical gratings to control capsule implosion symmetry with high finesse, and is on schedule to achieve ignition and potentially high gain before the end of the year."
That sounds terrifying. Then I read that it is just going to go unfunded. Not quite as interesting. Well played, headline writer, well played.
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"Anti-nuclear environmentalists"? Having them argue against a *fusion* project pretty much proves that these idiots are not qualified to remember to breathe, much less protect the environment.
Brett
Anti-nuclear environmentalist organizations...
So let me get this right, despite the fact that nuclear is incredibly safe, low-polluting, we still can't do research on it to make it safer and to increase "green" energy? How do these people expect us to get electricity?
Can't do coal because that pollutes, can't do oil/gas/diesel because that pollutes, can't use hydroelectric power because that can damage ecosystems, can't use wind power because it poses a risk to birds/bats, can't use biomass because if used at an industrial scale it still pollutes, and I'm sure if solar was halfway economical they would be protesting them because they were "ruining" the beauty/ecosystem of the desert.
Really, if you want "green" energy in our lifetime, support nuclear power. If not we still have way more than enough coal/oil to use...
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Anti-nuclear environmentalist organizations
The above statement appears to be ad-hominem nonsense. Quoth TFA:
green parliamentarians who believe that ITER is too costly and too speculative to warrant support. Rather than spending money on nuclear fusion, the greens would like to see ITER's funding spent on near-term renewable energy sources.
ITER is terribly expensive. Combined with a substantial risk that the project could fail to produce valuable results, it seems that asking hard questions and investigating alternatives for that investment is a wise move.
Well, Brett, I see you didn't even bother to read the articles. The summary blatantly misrepresents the environmentalist groups.
Based on the quotes in the articles, they're clearly not anti-nuclear. They're just asking for proper government regulation of any installations that are in fact built. Now, it's debatable whether the US government is capable of offering such regulation, especially after the BP disaster. But nevertheless, asking for regulation does not make them "anti-nuclear".
All progress must stop so we can, um, stay in the financial crisis forever?
ITER, Europe -- Physicists at the ITER Fusion Reactor announce new physics particle, known as the Existention. Previously only observed being emitted by cats placed in trap boxes filled with deadly acid, the creation of synthetic Existentions will open up a whole new line of research in quantum bogodynamics. An anonymous source close to the research team said it happened when the tight jeans worn by one of the research assistants distracted the operator of the reactor, causing what she loosely termed a "man event".
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Let me just say that fusion power is aweful; we should be using solar power instead.
I'll just wait for the irony to sink in. Yeah.
Gulf of Mexico oil spill units?
it makes me want to kill myself over and over. It really does. also the caps limit thing is retarded also the caps limit thing is retarded also the caps limit thing is retarded also the caps limit thing is retarded also the caps limit thing is retarded also the caps limit thing is retarded also the caps limit thing is retarded also the caps limit thing is retarded
Yes, Polywell is "unconfirmed" as to whether it can really work. Just like Focus Fusion, and Cold Fusion (which probably isn't even fusion as such, but some kind of effect seems to be happening), and all the other alternatives that are struggling to scrape together a shoestring budget -- they're all going to be "unconfirmed" until somebody spends some money to confirm or refute them. Now we see the folly of pouring tens of billions into one experiment while letting all the others starve.
Is the Polywell, which uses inertial electrostatic and magnetic confinement. And if physicists cared about actually giving the world nuclear fusion power they would cease work on the futile ITER project, which at this point is little more than a jobs program for some nuclear physicists, and start work on the Polywell fusion device, which only needs millions of dollars to be proven correct, not the countless billions that have been squandered on the ITER.
Right... I have NEVER seen commercial products made from experiments where the resulting product was smaller than the experimental rig...
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Maybe they just like burning coal and oil? Or perhaps they think it's fun to dramatically alter a region's environment with dams and reservoirs for hydroelectric.
Solar and wind is great but the sun doesn't shine 24 hours a day, and the wind doesn't blow every day. And I bet if you look hard enough you can find an environmentalist that is against geothermal power.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Not an argument a fact.
Here's a cite: http://www.energybulletin.net/51797
I was looking for another specific example. Google returned this.
I consider my position supported.
Including the 'hard greens are undoubtedly morons...' part. (read some of that blither on the link)
Finally fuck you moderator, Flamebait my ass. Hit too close to home.
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Now, it's debatable whether the US government is capable of offering such regulation, especially after the BP disaster. But nevertheless, asking for regulation does not make them "anti-nuclear".
Okay, but the problem is that if you think you need successful regulation to prevent a BP spill-like disaster, then you still kinda don't understand fusion power.
The problem with the BP spill is that once a problem occurred and oil leaked, the oil does what it naturally does and continues to be pushed out by the pressure underground. The problem with fission reactors is that when the control rods fail, the enriched uranium does what it naturally does and continues to release neutrons in a chain reaction.
When a fusion reactor fails, the fusion stops on a timescale that to human eyes would be called "instantly". The whole reason nuclear fusion is such a hard thing to make into a power source is that it takes so much damn effort to make the source material actually fuse because that is not it's natural state until you get enough of it in one place that you call it a star. It's inherent in the nature of the power source that it can't go out of control. "Out of control" means "stopped".
I'm an environmentalist, but also pro-fission. Yet I do think concerns about regulation of fission reactors are valid. How worried am I about regulation of fusion reactors? None worried.
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It's the "blame the smelly hippies" thing all over again, and once again the people you are blaming do not have the political power to do anything but make a mostly ignored noise as they complain.
Some would like to do exactly what you say, but that doesn't matter - how the hell are they going to?
They are insignificant and politically weak, so blaming them is just kicking a cat.
So now we have a mysterious un-named evil anti-intellectual, anti-rational, anti-scientific pressure group. How much power do these evil mysterious trouble makers have? Are they completely in control of whatever organization that they are in? Are there any other people in these groups that are in favor of fusion research? Is there any debate about the relative merits of fusion vs. other non-fossil energy sources among the "anti-fusion environmentalist organizations"?
The article referred to is in Nature, the prestigious British science journal. Do you think that they have any self interest in this debate? What are the chances that they would support the ending of a major scientific research effort in Europe in any circumstances? It's not that they are corrupt, but there is no question what side of the issue they will support.
And look how the Slashdot hoards start barking like a bunch of dogs who just caught a cat when they have a chance to trash "environmentalists". Some quotes:
Yes, according to the Slashdot Pundits, all environmentalists are the same: irrational anti-scientific scum who want to drive the planet into a new dark ages because of their ill founded personal vendetta against rational thought. No shades of gray here. No possibility that environmentalists can have various opinions. No possibility that there might be people in the environmental movement who are pro-fusion.
For all the pretense that Slashdot readers are rationalist who use there intellect to examine all sides of an issue, all I see here is a bunch of prejudiced morons who are more interested in thumping their chests and screaming insults at a perceived enemy then actually thinking about issues. You are exactly the same as the people who you construe as your opposition: irrational pigheads who cling to their preconceived notions and would rather make baseless charges then engage in meaningful discussion.
Why is Snark Required?
Obviously, an ideal power generation technology would be one that neatly scales from "smart dust" to "dyson sphere" and everything in between; but we are still waiting for the magic pony to deliver that one.
I think, though, that you underestimate the potential utility of technologies that can't easily be scaled down. Assuming an ITER-like fusion system actually works(obviously, if it doesn't, or is absurdly uneconomic, all bets are off), it isn't going to replace the legions of tiny, little, fast-spin-up gas turbine units; but there are still things you can do with it.
In areas of very high population density, you can just run power lines. That won't work for the boonies; but much of the world population doesn't live in the boonies(they wouldn't be the boonies if they did).
Of broader use, though, is the fact that a fair number of industrial and chemical processes are extremely energy intensive; but create a product that can be fairly easily transported, thus effectively "shipping electricity". Things like aluminum refining. Were some sort of very-large-scale fusion widget to work, one would expect to see a relatively small number of installations worldwide, each surrounded either by extremely dense populations, or by massive industrial hubs, shipping things in and out by (presumably electric) rail.
Sigh, I normally don't want to bother commenting on articles that have to do with fusion, but given the traffic that /. receives, it seems almost irresponsible to let such bullcrap have its way every time it rears its head.
First off, even from the getgo, ITER is arguably more pointless than it is purposeful. It's nowhere near a stepping stone towards an actual powerplant, even if this sucker proves to be able to do pulsed Q>10 fusion, the technology required for heating won't be economically or thermodynamically feasible for energy production for decades to come. While it's politically a great way to blow a large sum of money (we pulled out of this program at first, but went back in because Bush needed to kiss France's ass for the Iraq war), the most useful science coming out of it will be materials science in trying to deal with high TC superconductors and blanket materials constantly suffering neutron damage; blanket materials we won't need until a real fusion powerplant comes along (once again, decades). That aside, since its original proposal of sustained thermonuc. fusion has been thrown out in favor of hour-long pulses, probably 90% of the physics it will undergo is either known predictable. (In other words, this is NOT the plasma physics equivalent of the LHC, which is actually necessary to set boundary conditions on many physical models).
Now that's all a big clusterF* of he-said she-said that political spin gets to amplify 100-fold, but what really gets me is the comparison to NIF. Read the next few sentences very carefully:
1. NIF requires its tiny fuel pellets to be perfectly symmetrical, encased in a gold hohlraum, and perfectly centered, then shot at by the most powerful laser system ever created in earth.
2. NIF is a giant weapons research project, funded mostly by the DOD (Department, of, Defense) because we want to play nice and not test full blown warheads, and are instead simulating their fusion reactions in a laboratory (Go google NIF's funding, or enjoy the tid-bit that hohlraum was a classified word less than 30 years ago, the mention of which could get you interrogated by the FBI)
3. The laser system used to beat the crap out of the carefully assembled perfect heavy-water pellet has less than 1% efficiency. I don't care how big your Q is, the technology to fix THAT problem is way more than decades away.
4. Finally, a real powerplant, using the current studies NIF is undergoing, would require over ~60 perfectly frozen pellets (purpose is for yield, either of turbine-driving energy or more realistically better warhead modeling) per second fusion rate, lasers with a hundred times better efficiency (putting it at, oh say 10%? hah), and quite a bit of gold, that or another mechanism which they aren't studying.
The next time someone talks NIF like we're not trying to figure out a better way to irradiate large plots of people or land, please just look at them like the idiots they are.
I'm sorry fusion power is taking so long, we're working on it, and we're working pretty hard. But hey, and near-infinite supply of power from just centrifuged seawater is worth the wait, right? =P
Nuclear fusion is pretty much a potential infinite source of clean electrical energy and we have 2 options to try to master plasma confinement long enough to harvest that energy. One is investigated with ITER and the other is the inertial confinement.
Third is inertial electrostatic confinement - Busard's polywell, Elmore-Tuck-Watson, Farnsworth-Hirsch, ...
Fourth is dense plasma focus - Lerner, Mather, ...
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Since I've been through 50 posts and haven't seen a reasonable answer....
First let me say that I'm very much in favor of nuclear power generation, so even though I think fusion has an environmental cost, other options are often far worse.
There is no such thing as clean energy. An environmental cost must always be paid.
Asked and answered.
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Where are these convenient, pre-formed, barren valleys? In all of Europe? I doubt it, not everyone here has the space for solar, or enough sunshine to make it worthwhile.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
20 freaking Billion dollars and the Polywell group who has shown just as much progress with WB7 can't get more then $2M in funding by the Navy.
Sad
This is the Star Trek fallacy. Technology typically doesn't proceed in tech levels, where new advanced technology replaces older less advanced technology. Certainly there are a few examples where some new technology completely replaced the old technology in practical applications, such as guns replacing swords or automobiles replacing horse-drawn carriages. However, the vast majority of the time old and new technologies co-exist, not because the old technology isn't done being replaced yet but because it is still useful. For instance, although they are extremely ancient technologies we still use bronze and pottery.
This is particularly relevant in energy technology because what matters is the type of free energy available. If someone lived next to a literal mountain of coal, then why would it be ridiculous for them to dig up and burn it for energy? Sure, it will run out eventually and they'll have to either spend less energy or exploit some other energy source, but there's nothing crazy about using it.
It should be noted that modern electrical generation still relies heavily on coal and that oil & nuclear electricity generation uses the steam engine.
The future energy situation will probably have a lot of variety, from coal to fusion and everything in between. The balances will certainly be different, but the old technologies will never be completely obsolete as long as there is fuel remaining to be exploited at a reasonable cost.
Thorium is several orders of magnitude more abundant than Uranium, and many successful thorium plants exist throughout the world.
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The reaction stops all by itself. If you're going to argue against nuclear fission, please base your arguments against current designs.
No it doesn't. Good fission reactor designs can be made safe by creating a negative coefficient between temperature and reaction rate. Yet the fission reaction continues because uranium is unstable. Which is why bad and dangerous reactor designs are possible. You need regulation to make sure people aren't building them.
A bad fusion reactor on the other hand simply doesn't produce any power, because the reaction actually stops. That's why regulation isn't a concern.
We should be building fission reactors -- oh look, I'm arguing for nuclear fission! -- but the difference between them and fusion reactors (aside from one existing) is a simple fact that it does no good to ignore.
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