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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
The euro crisis must be deep indeed if government projects have to rely on barter.
I'll bet that a small focused team, privately funded, will figure out a path to safe and large scale fusion before ITER does.
There are certainly many problems with the way ITER is planned - the way they've distributed the manufacturing to keep all of the member countries happy is a recipe for inefficiency - but I think you underestimate how difficult projects like this actually are. Keep in mind that ITER is actually a scaled down version of what they originally wanted to build, and an actual commercial plant would be even more massive. One article I read mentioned that ITER required 150,000 km of superconducting wire; this isn't exactly commodity hardware. There's simply no way this wasn't going to cost many billions of euros, and require the full-time efforts of thousands of people.
Perhaps Bill Gates will lead the charge.
I would love to see private investors step up to the plate, but Bill Gates' net worth is about $66 billion, and ITER is currently projected to cost around 20 billion euros, so he'd have to drop a huge chunk of his fortune on what is still only a proof-of-concept machine (actually commercializing fusion power would require many billions more). Funding biomedical research as he's been doing is relatively cheap by comparison.
The only way a small, privately financed team will figure out commercially viable fusion power is if any of the proposed "LENR"/"cold fusion" schemes turns out to be successful. Obviously it would be great if this were to happen, but I'm not holding my breath.
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.
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!
It might be better for the environment and cheaper to operate than a uranium nuclear reactor,
This is very questionable. Fusion produces enormous amounts of neutrons (a factor of a hundred more than a typical fission reactor) that irradiate and weaken the reactor structure. You could work around that by surrounding the whole thing in liquid lithium to capture the neutrons and breed more fuel, but molten lithium is very nasty stuff, and the tritium bubbling out of it will be very hard to contain completely. Some people have proposed using He3 as a fuel, but that is utterly unrealistic (we don't have hardly any, it produces less energy when fused, and it is much harder to fuse He3 than D-T (which we still haven't done after 60 years of trying)).
Even if ITER is a success, and we achieve self-sustaining fusion, we are still a long and difficult way from commercialization. It is very likely we will decide it just isn't worth it.
I don't follow your logic. You have to put some energy into a magnetic field to set it up, but you have to put some energy into bending metal etc to build a solid reactor. With superconducting coils and nothing going on inside, the magnetic field costs nothing to maintain.
Of course, there is something going on inside, and it will cost energy to maintain the magnetic field. But I see no evidence that this should be of the same size as the energy produced. And I would have thought that the engineers working on devices like this would have thought of that at some point over the last thirty years. What you are suggesting is that every engineer/scientist who has worked on the project and its predecessors is a complete idiot.
As I understand it, the cost of maintaining the magnetic field increases as the surface of the container, i.e. as the square of dimension, and the energy produced as the volume of the container i.e. the cube of dimension. Therefore, by just scaling up, at some point power generation must exceed costs. Of course, that may be at an unattainably large volume, which is why we need more research before attempting to build one. But is is theoretically, if not commercially, a sure thing.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I can think of no technology which has comparable levels of continued failure.
I can, it's call the NIF...
Wouldn't it be great if just one company controlled everything so that... no wait.
Are you thinking of iTER? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.