Slashdot Mirror
ITER Fusion Project Struggles To Put the Pieces Together
ananyo writes "The world's largest scientific project is threatened with further delays, as agencies struggle to complete the design and sign contracts worth hundred of millions of euros with industrial partners. Sources familiar with the project warn that the complex system for buying ITER's many pieces could put the fusion reactor project even further behind schedule. Rather than providing cash, ITER's partners have pledged 'in kind' contributions of pieces of the machine. Magnets, instruments and reactor sections will arrive from around the world to be cobbled together at the central site in St-Paul-lès-Durance in southern France. Because no one body holds the purse strings, designs for the machine's components face a tortuous back-and-forth between the central ITER Organization and national 'domestic agencies', which ensure that local companies secure contracts for ITER's components. Managers say the project remains on schedule. But it would hardly be the first time that ITER had been delayed or faced budgetary difficulties."
The ITER project has an overly complex management for purely political reasons, and that causes complexities, delays and increased costs. However the managers think everything is fine.
TLDR is its a "pot luck" fusion reactor and its a hell of a lot of coordination work to make sure they don't end up with 25 bags of doritos and nothing else, and theres always some cheap bastard who wants to eat at the buffet but doesn't bring anything, and half the attendants have conflicting food allergies and religious food prohibitions.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Yeah, let politics and private interest handle building a fusion-reactor, genius...
Wouldn't it be great if just one company controlled everything so that... no wait.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
The euro crisis must be deep indeed if government projects have to rely on barter.
I wonder which country will be supplying the bubble-gum, bailing wire and duct-tape to make all the pieces fit together?
I doubt this project will ever do more than be a shining example of how not to do innovation. I'll bet that a small focused team, privately funded, will figure out a path to safe and large scale fusion before ITER does. Perhaps Bill Gates will lead the charge. His life's turn to altruism is good for the planet.
For french speakers : ITER, chronicles of an announced failure by Jean-Pierre Petit.
http://www.jp-petit.org/NUCLEAIRE/ITER/ITER_fusion_non_controlee/wurden.htm
Not sure if he has an English version
The world's largest scientific project
In what sense is that? Number of people directly working on it? Number of countries collaborating?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
For sixty years fusion scientists have been saying "We've almost got it." They're promising that if we keep throwing them billions, they might have something feasible in another fifty.
The highest power levels obtained even after half a decade's research was 65% of the input power and lasted for half a second. The power levels needed to keep the reaction self-sustaining are an order of magnitude higher, and to generate useful power is yet another order of magnitude *or two* higher than that.
There are no known materials that can withstand the radiation and temperatures anywhere nearly long enough; even a second's operation permanently damages and contaminates huge parts of the reactor vessel.
I can think of no technology which has comparable levels of continued failure. It's time to put large scale fusion research to bed until other necessary technologies have caught up, and put the money saved into solar/wind/hydro generation and grid improvements.
Please help metamoderate.
So ITER is an international version of the Space Shuttle which was an intentionally lousy design that "succeeded" by maximizing the number of contractors in different congressional districts that got government $$$. The difference is that there was still enough residual talent left at NASA for the Space Shuttle to at least take flight. Not so much for ITER.
If Bill Gates really wanted to help the world, he'd take $30 Billion and make it a prize for whoever can get an operation fusion reactor running. No awards go to maximizing sub-contractor payouts in this scenario. Instead, success would actually be the objective of the project instead of failure + guaranteed taxpayer funded payouts for the next 40+ years.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
If ITER is successful then it will supply manyfold energy for "manyfold Internet".
As 100 billion of computers wasting gigawatts each computer, for the only a purpose: to scale manyfold the Internet size and its increasing speed of access.
A subsidised government project has elements of bureaucracy and corruption.
News at 11?
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Cost?
Why can't one country step forward and just do it?
When it comes to the olympics, they're fighting over who gets to have the honour of spending a shitload of money for something nobody will really need at any time in the future. Here's something that would have an impact for everyone living on this planet for centuries to come and everybody claims it's way too expensive for a single country to do.
THIS IS STUPID!
No!!!
Photons go straighline, not curved lines. => "ITER does always waste photonic energy that's a part of the global energies." => Downs to zero energy because of the photonic energy is sucked from the global energies.
jcpm: i'm more intelligent than the sum of those scientists.
Yeah... but no. You must have forgotten to account for QM. Photons are waves and particles. Waves are not straight lines.
The rest of your comment seems part & parcel of timecube.com so I'll refrain my commenting.
MIT - NANOR reactor...http://cdn.coldfusionnow.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/HagelsteinPdemonstra.pdf SPaWAR - co-deposition of palladium ... http://www.spawar.navy.mil/sti/publications/pubs/tr/1696/tr1696.pdf
Dr. Iraj Parchamazad, Chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of LaVerne, in LaVerne, California - http://coldfusionnow.org/iraj-parchamazad-lenr-with-zeolites/
Let's continue work on ITER, but not ignore the progress in the lenr/lanr field by opening up federal funding and the us patent office to researchers in this field... The very least this will attract private investors under the protection of patents in which case the scientific establishment can keep denying lenr public funding.
And the assumption that it is a scientific project, when it is actually an engineering project.
The output of a scientific project is a paper. With photographs, maybe, diagrams etc. But mainly, a paper that says "we have discovered something new about the universe".
The output of an engineering project is something useful. Civil engineers build useful roads, aeronautical engineers build useful planes, and so on.
The intention of ITER is to build a useful fusion reactor - eventually. There may be a lot of science done on the way there, and there may be a lot of people with science PhDs working on the project. But it is fundamentally an engineering project.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
ITER fusion project struggles to put the pieces together.
Fusion ISN'T a waste of time. 'Management' is a waste of time. All they need to do is sustain the burn cycle for 4 minutes +, that's if they ever get machine finished of course.
As a developer I make most of the fundamental decisions about the projects I'm working on whilst 'management' dance around and get in the way over and over again. We need more scientists and fewer 'managers'. More pragmatists and fewer philosophers.
I am personally sick of people who line their pockets by calling themselves 'managers' and consistently fail to do the job properly.
So how do we get Elon Musk interested in fusion research?
Necron69
ITER Construction will be managed within an agreed capped ceiling of 4,700 kIUA (ITER Unit of Account in thousands). This construction cap is based on the ITER Baseline adopted in July 2010 by the ITER Council and cannot be exceeded.
From here.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
There is no future without fusion. We're bumming the sun's fusion, and the last sun's uranium. Either we become brilliant as the stars or cold as the void.
It's called "787 Dreamliner"
The world's largest scientific project
In what sense is that?
The size of the science, clearly.
My webcomic
I can think of no technology which has comparable levels of continued failure.
I can, it's call the NIF...
You must be talking about those EMC2 folks...
Unfortunatly, although the Navy continues to fund research into Polywell style fusion reactors, there are several big hurdles to overcome. The biggest ones (to me) are that the concept has unknown scaling constants (e.g, does a "big" version lose too much efficinecy), and they most expensive component (the magnets) are inside the reactor and get bombarded with radiation which creates and equally big material science headache as some of the alternate approaches.
Read more about it here...
If I had to make a guess at translating crazy to English, you are complaining the scientists are not taking into account loss of energy due to light being emitted by the plasma? If so, you are decades behind the work done on fusion plasmas, where radiative loses is a major consideration in design and operation of reactors. A lot of work is done to keep the machines clean and reduce the amount of impurities introduced into the plasma, as impurities and high Z ions typically radiate a crap ton more than the hydrogen used for the bulk plasma. Also, in an actual electricity producing reactor, any radiated power would be collected by the same heat collection systems meant to collect power from neutrons, which also go in straight lines.
The intention of ITER is to build a useful fusion reactor - eventually.
No, not really. They don't have any plans to convert excess energy into electrical power. At best, assuming they can get it to work, it will be useful as a test bed for materials.
http://www.generalfusion.com/
Mostly random stuff.
Hi
I'm a fusion scientist that contributes to the ITER project and other general fusion work. There are several issues here.
1) Someone earlier posted what fusion scientists in the 70's said and they were entirely correct, fusion has never been adequately funded to a level that would provide this 30 year goal. What those reasons are I leave to the commentators but they are the usual suspects. One of my colleagues maintains that "Fusion will be ready when its needed", i.e. when we can fund it to to the level that is required we can get it done.
2) With regards to the timescale, someone else also noted that ITER requires some 150,000 km of superconducting strands, worldwide superconductor production of the type required for ITER was only 20 tonnes a year when construction started, requiring US, Russia, China and Japan to complete the magnets within the timescale.
3) One country could step forward and do it, given where the energy demands and population growth are around the world, it wouldn't surprise me if China gave it a good go.
4) The so called radiation damage in ITER is actually quite negligible, the fast reactor programs had much higher radiation damage levels than ITER will have, the reactor that follows ITER would however dwarf the radiation damage levels we have seen to date.
5) The real truth of the matter is that the Tokamak is the best chance of fusion power becoming a power source, NIF (National Ignition Facility) is behind where they estimated they would and even if they weren't laser fusion is some 20-30 years behind magnetic fusion. The alternative concepts, such as General Fusion or others are much smaller attempts, with to be quite honest some of the same problems when it comes to materials but with a 1/100th of the investment.
Hope this helps clarify
Thanks
Yet another reason why promoting employment is stupid. Promoting better cheaper etc. services and products is where it is at, as THAT promotes employment AND happier customers. Yet another reason why governments should limit themselves to tangible activities - defense, justice, taxing, spending, re-distributing income if they want, but stay the heck out of egalitarian fantasy of all kinds. Such as promoting local employment when spending taxes taken from local taxpayers. It's morally the same thing as bribing those who please you as a part of taxing or spending.
ITER, over its life, will expose the first wall to about 10 displacements per atom (dpa, the number of times each atom in the first wall is displaced by a neutron collision). A commercially viable reactor will need a material that can withstand at least 150 dpa, and probably several times that. There is no such material known.
An even worse problem with tokamaks is disruptions. These are catastrophic losses of confinement that dump all the energy in the plasma in about a millisecond. These events are very rough on the inside of the reactor. For example, 70% of the energy comes out as a beam of relativistic electrons (accelerated by a runaway process as the plasma's magnetic field collapses). This beam will have energy similar to a lightning bolt. On a commercial reactor, it will have a current of about 100 million amps, and would vaporize a hole through the side of the reactor. Even if that problem could be avoided, the massive magnetic forces from the disruption, acting on the first wall and coils, would likely break things.
I predict disruptions will break ITER before its intended lifespan, and they won't be able to repair it (since it will be too radioactive for hands on maintenance).
Assuming all that could be solved, there is grave doubt that the blanket of a fusion reactor can achieve sufficient excess tritium production. The breeding ratio needed is considerably greater than 1, since building thousands of fusion reactors will require that later ones are fueled by earlier ones (in addition to those earlier ones refueling themselves). The requirement that the first wall be rugged and resilient is in conflict with it having a high breeding ratio.
Even if all that could be solved, economics will likely be a showstopper. Tokamaks are very complicated and massive, more so than fission reactor cores. They save cheap uranium at the cost of lots more expensive capital equipment. It's a penny wise, pound foolish approach to engineering. With fission reactors already only marginally competitive due to capital cost, fusion reactors are a nonstarter (and not just tokamaks).