ITER Fusion Reactor On Track To Generating Power By 2028

ananyo writes "ITER, the multibillion-euro international nuclear-fusion experiment, is on track to generate power by 2028. But some of the science that was supposed to happen along the way is going to be dropped to keep the vision alive. The plans form the main thrust of recommendations by a 21-strong expert panel of international plasma scientists and ITER staff, convened to reassess the project's research plan in the light of the construction delays. The plans were discussed this week at a meeting of ITER's Science and Technology Advisory Committee. The meeting is the start of a year-long review by ITER to try to keep the experiment on track to generate 500 MW of power from an input of 50 MW by 2028, and so hit its target of attaining the so-called Q10, where power output is ten times input or more. ITER initially aims to produce a Q10 for a few seconds, and then for pulses of 300–500 seconds, and work up over the following decade to output ratios of 30 times more power out than in, with pulses lasting almost an hour. Eventually the aim is to develop steady-state plasmas, which will yield information relevant to industrial-scale fusion-power generation. It is experiments relating to the understanding of longer-pulse and steady-state ITER plasmas that are most likely to be delayed beyond 2028."

Comments

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[TangoMargarine]

It takes a special brand of incompetent to that obviously fuck up an article *headline.*

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[bondsbw]

A fusion reactor would be able to power itself... so I guess the headline is actually correct.

this is excellent news about generating power.

[nimbius]

ITER Fusion Reactor On Track To Generating Power By Generating Power By 2028? i for one am certainly am certainly excited by this news. The potential to potential to solve humanities ever growing ever growing energy needs is certainly is certainly something we can all can all agree is important is important.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[durrr]

The problem with the ITER approach is that the commercial reactor types based on it will cost too much to compete with traditional nuclear and coal. As It's based on a GIGANTIC no-financial-holds-barred approach.

The smaller approaches like LPP, General fusion, TriAlpha and whatever they're called nowdays that have shoestring to moderate budget will likely not only succeed to produce viable fusion energy sooner, they'll do so much cheaper too.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that comment is the funniest thing I've read all day. Thank you.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[Jane Q. Public]

"The potential to potential to solve humanities ever growing ever growing energy needs is certainly is certainly something we can all can all agree is important is important."

Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department, of your Natural Guard.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of alternative fusion reactor designs being researched, and mostly are all a lot smaller and cheaper than something like ITER. But they are not excepted to stay that cheap, and prices will go a lot higher when scaled up. Many projects have already reached the point that basically says, "We need you to add another zero to our budget so we can build a ten times bigger version, but it won't quite be at breakeven then." While there is still a lot of hope these projects will produce something cheaper than a tokamak in the long run, the final plants will likely still be about the same price range as fission plants. It is a bit early to tell though, and it isn't even easy to extrapolate a power plant cost from ITER's cost, considering how it is a research design with way more diagnostics, access, and flexibility than would be needed in a power plant.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[Zalbik]

The problem with the smaller approaches is that they have all failed to reach the break even point, and there is no indication that they even can reach break-even at their current scales.

It's a little like the old joke: "We'll lose 2 cents on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume!"

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[Anonymous Coward]

The smaller approaches like LPP, General fusion, TriAlpha and whatever they're called nowdays that have shoestring to moderate budget will likely not only succeed to produce viable fusion energy sooner, they'll do so much cheaper too.

TriAlpha and General Fusion are just spheromak devices. A spheromak a self organized plasma. It's magnetic field is produced completely self consistently. The problem is that plasma current causes instabilities. So the spheromak has all the problems of the tokamak with none of the advantages. A spheromak has never produced fusion because the instabilities cause the confinement to be lost after micro seconds.

LPP might be able to create fusion but you never get more power out of it than you put in. This, as well and the afore mentioned devices, are inherently pulsed machines and you could never get the repetition rate up high enough to make it into a power plant. You just can't change capacitors fast enough in an efficient manner. The inertial confinement fusion suffers the same problem.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. The road to fusion is littered with the corpses of failed designs. I wish the smaller guys well, but they have very little to show.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[Anonymous Coward]

Self organizing plasma like a reversed field pinch doesn't have all of the problems of a tokamak, e.g. no ELMs. Like any of the other designs, they trade off one problem for another. But they do get temperatures within a factor of 5 of fusion temperatures, and have enough high energy ions to produce fusion neutrons as is. New, larger ones haven't been built since the 90s though since tokamaks and stellators are getting priority.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[Jesrad]

Actually, the problem with the ITER approach is that it cannot ever produce net power because of Bremsstrahlung losses inherent to its design. Simply put, you cannot heat the plasma with radiowaves AND extract useful heat from it because it's more efficient at cooling down itself radiatively in radiowaves you cannot make good use of.

It is also highly vulnerable to disruptions, as are all magnetically-confined fusing plasma (all variants of tokamaks) - disruptions that are similar in nature to solar eruptions and will cause catastrophic damage.

But ITER will still eat billions, mostly in tax money, to get some science done at least... though it seems from TFA that this last part will be abandoned for the sake of trying futilely to produce energy instead.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the problem with the ITER approach is that it cannot ever produce net power because of Bremsstrahlung losses inherent to its design. Simply put, you cannot heat the plasma with radiowaves AND extract useful heat from it because it's more efficient at cooling down itself radiatively in radiowaves you cannot make good use of.

That's why it's going to use Neutral Beam Heating

It is also highly vulnerable to disruptions, as are all magnetically-confined fusing plasma (all variants of tokamaks) - disruptions that are similar in nature to solar eruptions and will cause catastrophic damage.

Not all magnetic confinement devices have disruptions. Stellarator

But ITER will still eat billions, mostly in tax money, to get some science done at least... though it seems from TFA that this last part will be abandoned for the sake of trying futilely to produce energy instead.

Achieving ignition is still doing science. It's just going to be different science.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the problem with the ITER approach is that it cannot ever produce net power because of Bremsstrahlung losses [wikipedia.org] inherent to its design.

Maybe read your own link there which discusses how around optimum temperatures for DT fusion the bremsstrahlung is there, but is small compared to the fusion power. You can heat plasma as hot as you want with RF power if you have enough of it. It is not like some thermodynamics question where you are using two black body emitters to exchange heat, but using a specific frequency when the return spectrum is much broader, like using a laser to heat up something. And besides, not just RF heating will be used, as neutral beam heating will also be used due to some advantages it has.

as are all magnetically-confined fusing plasma (all variants of tokamaks

There are a couple variations of tokamaks around, but by far, other magnetic confinement schemes are not variants of the tokamak. Thins like RFPs and stellerators are roughly toroidal, but have very different magnetic field geometries. Other designs are not even toroidal in shape. Other designs avoid disruptions, although are not free from their own set of problems.

though it seems from TFA that this last part will be abandoned for the sake of trying futilely to produce energy instead.

The stuff at the end of the summary is poorly written. Steady state plasma and generation of electricity was never part of ITER's design. ITER is primarily a testbed and demonstration of science for a burning plasma, reactor components, and plasma control. Emphasis on generating electrical power will be for a follow up experiment, e.g. DEMO.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[TWiTfan]

A Department of the Department of Divisions and Departments, Administrative Division.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[geekoid]

You just need to control the normal inter-particle scattering, something like IEC.

Improvement

[jandrese]

Fusion power has been 20 years away for something like 60 years now. It is progress that we're down to only 15 years away. Hopefully by 2053 we'll be down to just 10 years away.

Re:Improvement

[bobbied]

You are sooo right. I've been reading "fusion power is coming soon!" for decades. Hopefully they are actually making progress and not just being more optimistic in their projections. With any luck, we won't run out of fossil fuels before they manage it.

Reminds me of an axiom of getting the status of software development tasks. "If a developer *says* they are 90% done," they are really only half way there. Or the one that says "The last 10% takes more than half the effort."

Re:Improvement

[Salgak1]

In related news, We have ALWAYS been at war with EastAsia; We're from the Government, and here to help; I'll respect you in the morning, and; I'm a Lawyer, you can trust me. . .

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Induction is not a logically valid form of reasoning.

Re:Improvement

[allcoolnameswheretak]

Well, first they must sell us all of that oil that they are laboriously sucking out of the ground, then they must sell us all that energy produced by their expensive nuclear power plants, then maybe they will actually find a way to cash in on all that green energy business the hippies keep raving about. And then, only then we can talk practically free, abundant energy for everyone.

Uhum, sure.

You might want to add a couple more decades to your list.

Re:Improvement

[0123456]

Indeed. Pretty soon we'll have an entire generation of scientists and engineers retiring after spending their entire life NOT generating power from fusion.

We should have scrapped the whole thing long ago.

Re:Improvement

[Inzkeeper]

I agree that fusion power has been 20 years off for at least 60 years now.
We have known the basic principles for a long time so how hard can it be, right?
You just mash some atoms together until they fuse. After lunch we will tackle time travel.

What makes this different is the international consortium of government funding of the project to the tune of $30 BILLION.
Call me naive, but I believe this is going to happen. On time and on budget, well, that is a different question.

Re:Improvement

[0123456]

What makes this different is the international consortium of government funding of the project to the tune of $30 BILLION.

I'm sure usable fusion reactors will be built at some point this century. I'm equally sure that they won't be developed by governments throwing money at people with a decades-long record of failure.

Re:Improvement

[mlts]

Look at what it took with the US to make nuclear fission with the Manhattan Project. Sometimes the only way to get something to work is to throw enough money at it, that just sheer force of capital, it gets done.

Call me naive as well, but look at the payoff: Global warming slowed (manufacturing goods still will spew CO2, but burning coal and other stuff would be stopped.) Desalination would become easy so field would be irrigated regardless of how fickle the weather gets. Oil and gas still have a use (polymers), and those resources can be used as construction materials, not burned.

Even things that couldn't be done due to being energy prohibitive would make economic sense. Titanium would become far cheaper to make and would be a very useful building material.

Of course, with useful energy comes a row of advances. Space elevators become closer to reality for example.

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

You are sooo right. I've been reading "fusion power is coming soon!" for decades.

When the first projection was made back in the 70s about fusion in next 50 years, it assumed that funding would remain constant or would increase. But what happened was funding kept getting slashed, over and over again. It would be like saying we'll get to the moon in a decade in 1960, and then proceeding to gut NASA of any resources. Then in 1970s bitching they are not much further along as they only had money for 1 sounding rocket and 3 slide rules.

To be even more frank, fusion *requires* that physical sciences and material sciences advance to a certain point. Cutting funding to such research makes fusion further away. And physical science research has been severely cut since 1970s. If it wasn't for the EU, Japan and China, ITER would not have existed in the first place. US has only shut down funding.

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

I"ve said the same thing about Solar power as well. Every store here, and elsewhere, always states that the "new breakthrough" is 5-10 years off from being mass produced to revolutionize solar power. Twenty years later, and we're all still waiting.

Re:Improvement

[bill_mcgonigle]

Those were my thoughts as well, but it's worth pointing out that if the US had poured $1T into fusion research instead of an Iraq War, we might be looking at 5 years out instead.

The false assumption there was that the Middle East oil was the primary motivation for the war (rather than the pricing of that oil), so it doesn't really make direct sense, but if we had better people running the society, better things would happen.

Re:Improvement

[0123456]

Look at what it took with the US to make nuclear fission with the Manhattan Project. Sometimes the only way to get something to work is to throw enough money at it, that just sheer force of capital, it gets done.

That wasn't 'making nuclear fission work'. That was making nuclear bombs work.

Fission reactors were essentially trivial: pile up enough moderately enriched uranium and it starts fissioning on its own.

Re:Improvement

[jklovanc]

Even this one does not say we will be using electricity generated by fusion power in 15 years

Eventually the aim is to develop steady-state plasmas, which will yield information relevant to industrial-scale fusion-power generation. It is experiments relating to the understanding of longer-pulse and steady-state ITER plasmas that are most likely to be delayed beyond 2028.

Basically they say they can generate power by 2028 but not at a scale that can be used industrially. Even the research on industrial scale will have to wait till after that and there is no estimate on how long it will take. They didn't shorten th time; they just changed the target. There is a big difference between "generate power" and "generate power in an industrial scale and decrease reliance on fossil fuels".

Re:Improvement

[onkelonkel]

"sheer force of capital" - nice, I will have to steal that and use it sometime.

Re:Improvement

[Isaac-1]

It is not just willingness to through money at the problem, but to cut through the red tape. At one point in the Manhattan project they needed the use of a large amount of silver (6,000 tons) to build the magnets for one of the Uranium processing plants at Oak Ridge TN (There was a war time shortage of Copper) So they "borrowed it from the U.S. Treasury, a mid level procurement officer went to Washington with a a letter saying a AAA priority war project needed it,...

Re:Improvement

[Valdrax]

Of course, this all assumes that fusion will be cheap someday. That's even further off than "commercially viable" or even "sustainable as a 24/7 power source even with heavy subsidies" is.

For all we know, fusion may always be expensive but still have utility in avoiding some of the hidden costs of "cheaper" fossil fuels.

Re:Improvement

[Sardaukar86]

We should have scrapped the whole thing long ago.

Personally I'm very glad Lockheed-Martin don't share your defeatist attitude.

A fully operational commercial reactor by 2027? Sounds like progress to me.

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

$30 billion. How about some perspective. Or the $160 billion spent each year looking for new oil sources. $30 billion is like a bad joke. Let's go for that much per year for a while and move the test dates of ITER up from 2028 to at least 2018. It's past time to get this done, we're really dragging our feet. And while I'm ranting, where's the full size polywell? We can do several things at the same time.
One thing is for sure, fusion will never work unless we actually try to make it work.

Re:Improvement

[necro81]

It would be like saying we'll get to the moon in a decade in 1960, and then proceeding to gut NASA of any resources. Then in 1970s bitching they are not much further along as they only had money for 1 sounding rocket and 3 slide rules

That just about sums up the history of manned space flight ever since we got to the Moon; certainly since the Shuttle.

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is not generating power on "industrial scale", but simply generating electricity. ITER was never expected to be used for generating electricity from the power, but it is expected to produce upwards of 500 MW of fusion power. Proposed variations on a followed up designed, usually named DEMO, are where test are supposed to be done for generating electricity and preparing it for actual power plant use instead of science and basic engineering development. There are timelines around for that too.

Re:Improvement

[necro81]

I'm equally sure that they won't be developed by governments throwing money at people with a decades-long record of failure.

And I am equally sure that whoever does figure out commercially viable fusion will owe a great debt to the cost-overridden, government-funded nuclear and plasma research that preceded it. Whether it is actually acknowledged ... well ... I'll settle for being able to keep the lights on without melting the planet.

Re:Improvement

[necro81]

Fission reactors were essentially trivial: pile up enough moderately enriched uranium and it starts fissioning on its own.

Which, although perhaps technically easier, wasn't exactly cheap, either. It was also heavily funded and subsidized by governments. If left solely to the private sector to be developed and proven, it probably still would have happened, but who knows when and in what form.

Re: Improvement

[David Gould]

Also, even with all the perpetually shifting estimates, it really does appear to be getting closer. It's not a case of "always 50 years away": 50 years ago, it was "50 years away"; 20 years ago, it was "25 years away"; now, it's "15 years away". That is actual progress -- not as fast as we'd like, or as was once expected, but progress.

Re:Improvement

[lgw]

With any luck, we won't run out of fossil fuels before they manage it.

We've been 20 years away from running out of fossil fuels for about as long as we've been 20 years away from fusion - many decades. No worries - there's a big working fusion reactor in the Blue Room, and if fossil fuels run low we'll just start putting up collectors.

Fusion is really only interesting for mobile applications (which will be 20 years away once we have industrial fusion power), until/unless our civilization moves beyond Type I on the Kardashev scale.

Re:Improvement

[Zalbik]

Pretty soon we'll have an entire generation of scientists and engineers retiring after spending their entire life NOT generating power from fusion.

Your parents spent at least a couple of decades of their lives NOT producing you.

They should have stopped while they were ahead.

Re:Improvement

[lgw]

They claim they'll have a 100 MW reactor ready in 4 years. Fundamental research kept secret from everyone else in the field, or utter bullshit - which do you think is more likely?

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree - $30 Billion is chump change. The risk reward balance is weighed heavily in favour of spending triple that and accelerating development. What are the consequences of not having a replacement for fossil fuels in the next 50 years? Will renewables be enough to sustain our civilization with half again as much population? The engineering is there now, the materials science is quickly advancing, the scientific description of the process has been around for decades - what the hell are we waiting for? The US Government spends more each month propping up a terminally ill consumer society. Ontario flushed 1 Billion down the drain in cancellation fees related to proposed gas generating plants.

Re:Improvement

[angel'o'sphere]

It wont be a full scale operating commercial reactor.
It will still be a PULSED research reactor with no generators for electric power generation attached.

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod up! It would be more accurate to say that we are so many billion (or trillion) dollars away from fusion power. The 20 years bit is sort of the "if people gave a damn, we could get it running by then... if not, we'll kind of plod along bit by bit"... these are not reactors you can build in your basement.

Re:Improvement

[lgw]

It's not like we couldn't do both - US government spending is in no way limited by funding these days. And, heck, maybe the Iraq war did some little good: Iraq is still holding itself together as a democracy, however tenuously. What good did handing $1T to bankers in "bailouts" do us?

But as a nation we seem incapable of spending on infrastructure these days. I think we've passed our peak.

Re:Improvement

[angel'o'sphere]

It is not a project with a decades-long record in failure. Actually they are very successful. However the public mind always thaught a commercial (working) version would just be around the next corner.

Re:Improvement

[bobbied]

Fossil fuels will never run out, this much is sure. What will happen is that recovering them will become more and more difficult making other technologies more cost effective, which is exactly what you are describing.

Re:Improvement

[tp1024]

Plans to build ITER started in 1983. That's 30 years ago. It was planned as a cooperation with the Soviet Union. Failure of the USSR to exist (and be solvent) when it neared realization delayed it. After new plans were made in 1996 or so, it took another decade just to agree on which country would have the honour of building it.

There has been little progress towards fusion in the meantime, because you need better fusion reactors - better hardware - to do that. As it is, the best hardware so far was build in 1983, the Joint European Torus(JET). There are some other reactors that are roughly on par with it (perhaps slightly better), but nothing that would mark serious progress.

When it comes to fusion reactors, size matters. When you build a reactor twice as big in every dimension, you will get roughly 8 times the fusion yield. When you double the magnetic field strength, it doubles too. ITER is more than twice as big as JET and has just over four times the magnetic field strength. The lack of progress stems from the deplorable fact that nobody has build anything in-between over the last 30 years. This makes the problems for ITER even worse, since there is now no experience in that realm and extrapolation of physical characteristics may break down at some point.

Re:Improvement

[0123456]

Which, although perhaps technically easier, wasn't exactly cheap, either. It was also heavily funded and subsidized by governments.

Which merely brought it ahead by a few years.

If left solely to the private sector to be developed and proven, it probably still would have happened, but who knows when and in what form.

Almost certainly not the form which produced Chernobyl and Fukupishima.

There are much better and safer reactor designs, but only if you don't want to use them to make plutonium for nuclear bombs.

Re:Improvement

[Sardaukar86]

They claim they'll have a 100 MW reactor ready in 4 years. Fundamental research kept secret from everyone else in the field, or utter bullshit - which do you think is more likely?

Your scepticism is the product of a healthy mind. Were it anyone other than Skunkworks or one of the NASA labs I think my own bullshit-detector would be have squealed.

I do take comfort in their relatively conservative estimate that another full decade of development will be needed to achieve commercialisation following a successful proof-of-concept in 2017. At least it won't be long before we'll know if this is fact or unicorn farts.

Re:Improvement

[0123456]

It is not a project with a decades-long record in failure. Actually they are very successful.

At what?

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice, but if the net energy gain of those other technologies is not greater than that of fossil fuels, then we're screwed. And so far it looks like none of the other technologies has a comparable EROEI, let alone the mobility and flexibility of fossil fuels.

Re:Improvement

[Sardaukar86]

It wont be a full scale operating commercial reactor. It will still be a PULSED research reactor with no generators for electric power generation attached.

Err, sorry - I was referring to the LM experimental reactor I linked to, not ITER's tokamak.

Although I used to be a big fan of the work, I'm pretty sure I'll never see a commercial reactor born of the ITER project in my lifetime.

Re: Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

This project is more about generating employment for scientists and technology assessment, just like LHC via science lobby. Even if this all worked as planned (unlikely), it would only produce about 3x more power then fission, the tokamak tech. is scarily difficult to sustain and operate. The fusion plant based utility company would likely charge as much as for fission power.

Re:Improvement

[lgw]

Recovering oil has become so easy (at current prices) that "supply is not an issue". Current oil prices are historically high, to be sure, but supply cost is unlikely to increase. Technological progress has made natural gas fantastically cheap, not more expensive. There's not really a "peak oil" scenario here - supply will keep increasing, just as it has kept increasing for decades, until something better comes along (which is certain to happen eventually).

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

But this also means energy is more and more expensive, so the kind of social model we are used to will have to change.

Re:Improvement

[X0563511]

Blame the politicians, not the scientists and engineers.

Re:Improvement

[X0563511]

Although I used to be a big fan of the work, I'm pretty sure I'll never see a commercial reactor born of the ITER project in my lifetime.

That's no reason to abandon it.

Re:Improvement

[Sardaukar86]

Although I used to be a big fan of the work, I'm pretty sure I'll never see a commercial reactor born of the ITER project in my lifetime.

That's no reason to abandon it.

I'm not sure why my conclusion read that way to you, perhaps I should have worded it differently.

I believe we need to pursue all reasonable avenues as far as fusion research goes. ITER has already taught us much, has a great deal more to teach us yet and the money spent on the various fusion programmes is peanuts next to the cash pissed away on the War On Some Drugs and the War On Terr'sm amongst others.

Re:Improvement

[DerekLyons]

We have known the basic principles for a long time so how hard can it be, right? You just mash some atoms together until they fuse.

Unfortunately, the real world is rather more complex than elementary school level description - and the devil is in the details. A scientist friend of mine who studies high energy plasmas (but over on the astrophysics side of the house) says that "the history of fusion research is the history of finding ever more maddening and subtle ways that plasma can misbehave".

Re:Improvement

[holmstar]

At making forward progress despite the tiny budget (the original project completion estimates were based on a much higher level of funding)

Re: Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

" it really does appear to be getting closer."
Nope. Magnetic confinment will never work and should have been abandon a decade ago. yet they continue to pour billions into it. All Iter does is provide decades of salaries for Plasma researchers. If Magnetic confinement did work they would have a working desktop machine costing a few hundred grand. No need to biuld a gigantic machine, except to employee more workers and inflate egos!

Re:Improvement

[crunchygranola]

Fusion power has been 20 years away for something like 60 years now. It is progress that we're down to only 15 years away. Hopefully by 2053 we'll be down to just 10 years away.

No, you misunderstand. ITER is not predicting fusion power in 15 years. They are predicting a gigantic laboratory experiment that will: Not. Produce. Any. Electricity. Whatsoever.

ITER declares itself to be a model for a far more expensive fusion prototype power plant called DEMO for which even the conceptual design will not be seen for years, and could not produce grid electricity before the 2040s, which is, wait for it, still more than 25 years away!

Once DEMO has been built and has been put into operation is will be proven that since the capital cost for the breeding blanket alone dwarfs the cost of even fission reactors it will be the most expensive source of electricity in the world, costing more than solar power does today.

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the $300 billion the US has spent on missile defense research without anything really working.

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if you compare the Wright Bros. to their govt. competitors. Look up Sikorsky and flight.

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you stopped to think what it means, when an engineer gives you a time estimate of "in 50 years"? It translates as "not during my career", which means "I'm not going to finish the job, and neither are my colleagues", and he's saying that, because what he actually means "we have no clue how to do it".

When they started on fusion research, they didn't have any clue at all on how hard it would be. So they estimated that it will take forever.

The same goes for politicians, btw. An 80% renewable power grid by 2050? That means "we're not going to achieve that at all, but I'll be dead when the voters find out about it." I wouldn't trust any promises or predictions further out than about 5 years. And even those are subject to Hofstadter's Law.

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[allcoolnameswheretak]

Wow, every single time I criticize or make a light out of energy businesses or nuclear power, I get modded down. Seriously!

You guys are all over Slashdot, aren't you?

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll eat a 10-gallon hat if they have "A fully operational commercial reactor by 2027". In fact I'll eat that same hat if they have any kind of experimental reactor that achieves 10X (or better) more power output than power input. Note that this can therefore be a 6 gigajillion dollar, international, size of Rhode Island monstrosity that runs off unicorn horns and yeti farts.

Fusion research has made painfully slow progress and no amount of techno-masturbation, wish fullfillment, Iron Man fantasy makes it otherwise.

Of course to the faithful, it's always just around the corner and there are an endless stream of excuses why it wasn't, when looking retrospectively. It's like talking to a doomsday evangelist. "Fusion is Near! Repent ye lost souls of carbon!"

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully semiconductor and superconductor technology has advanced quite a lot separate from fusion research in the past couple decades, so it's starting to be possible to have adequately fast controls over magnetic containment fields (and heating) in the tokamaks now, and cables capable of providing the power necessary to produce the fields in the first place. Yes, this would have gone much faster with more funding. Yes, the US has totally sucked viz. ITER in that it refuses to fund anything not on its own soil because USA #1, but also thankfully the EU, Japan, and China recognize how important this particular bit of research is to...everything, and are willing to throw at least a bit of money at it now that the US is not the only economic power with any resources worth speaking of in the world anymore.

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much. There's also the fact that, if we ever solve this problem, then we solve a lot of our energy crises (ok, maybe not ALL of them considering that a lot of the materials involved in producing such a reactor aren't exactly common or easy to make (high temperature superconducting ceramics for one, rare earths to make the tritium for another)). But it's a massive step away from fossil fuels, proliferation issues related to fission reactors (uranium enrichment, plutonium breeding for better fuel efficiency... All you might get from a fusion reactor is a bit of radioactive containment vessel from high energy neutron flux from a D-T reaction, but nothing fissile, and bombs don't work by fusion alone), and, if we can get the reaction energies up eventually to the point where we can do D-D reactions, we basically have as much fuel as we'll ever need sitting in the oceans.

Re:Improvement

[Sardaukar86]

..size of Rhode Island monstrosity that runs off unicorn horns and yeti farts.

That sounds like it would be worth doing on its own merit. :-)

Fusion research has made painfully slow progress and no amount of techno-masturbation, wish fullfillment, Iron Man fantasy makes it otherwise.

It sure has, but that's not entirely down to fusion is hard, we all know it hasn't received the funding it should, yadda.

What LM Skunkworks is doing does not appear to be anything revolutionary. Their designs are a completely believable evolutionary progression of the current thinking. Seriously, how hard is it to imagine one of these clever scientists having a lightbulb appear over his or her head, turning to a colleague and asking "I wonder how a cylinder might work?" Spheromaks already exist so it isn't much of a logical leap (not detracting in any way from their great work.)

Of course to the faithful, it's always just around the corner and there are an endless stream of excuses why it wasn't, when looking retrospectively. It's like talking to a doomsday evangelist. "Fusion is Near! Repent ye lost souls of carbon!"

There's no need for faith in Science, only faith in the Scientific Method. Even that is just bad poetry; there is already plenty of obvious evidence of the Scientific Method's efficacy.

Re:Improvement

[mdsolar]

There has been pretty steady effort on this. It takes generations of PhDs to get this job done and it does not really scale up once the funding profile has been set. The main goal was to have fusion ready for when the coal ran out. We seem to be on track. There is a potential tritium bottle neck which may suffer from scarce uranium resources. But renewables seem to be putting fission out of business so perhaps that shortage may never come to pass. But the weakening of fission's prospects suggests that fusion may face the same economic hurtle. Wind, solar and batteries keep getting cheaper and cheaper as they scale. It will be very hard for fuel based energy systems of any sort to compete.

Re:Improvement

[angel'o'sphere]

At what?
At understanding how plasmas and fusion is working "in the lab" or "in a plant".

Fusion power research got less funding in its entire life time than one year of the US budget for the military. And note: ITER is a multi national research effort.

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the US has totally sucked viz. ITER in that it refuses to fund anything not on its own soil because USA #1,

Kind of the opposite at this point, with the US funding one eleventh of ITER like other single country members, to the potential detriment of domestic programs. If total US fusion funding remains roughly flat, DoE is considering massive cuts to domestic funding in order to continue paying for the construction of ITER. Researchers are questioning what this would do to available pool of scientists and engineers from the US after the construction is paid for because most would have been kicked out of the field due to lack of funding.

Re: Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

it would only produce about 3x more power then fission,

3x times as much power per plant? per reactor? per dollar? per area of land use? per kg of fuel? Looks like a rather vague and arbitrary statement that is meaningless. And what makes it "scarily difficult" instead of "very difficult"?

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

The Iraq war only made money for the military industrial complex, in exchange for:
1) displacing 3.4 million people (1.8 million homeless actually left Iraq), and
2) killing somewhere in the neighborhood of 120,000-140,000 *civilians*, plus another 40,000-50,000 combatants (i.e. about 70% were innocent bystanders), and
3) sending 100,000 refugees into Syria and Jordan EACH MONTH.

Nothing good came out of the Iraq war unless you work for one of the corporations owned and run by the American elite who benefited financially from the deaths of these people.

The last thing those people want is to wean us off oil. Their power structure is built on oil, and the need for oil. They will do everything they can to delay alternative energy generation.

Re:Improvement

[khallow]

I don't see that. I see fusion research squandering a lot of money for little gain. To be even more frank than the fantasy presented above, my take is that if fusion research had been funded to the desired level, it would be an epic fail for a very simple reason. They wouldn't be building a design that could be commercially viable. That's the only justification for spending that much money.

Re: Improvement

[delt0r]

Confinement times has improved faster than mores law for the last 30 years. It really is closer. But many are unsure if ITER is really the best next step. Either way we are stuck with it now. Mite as well follow through.

Re: Improvement

[delt0r]

If you could get fusion on the desktop. You can make a nuke in a garage. We spend less on fusion than energy subsidies.

Re:Improvement

[Neil Boekend]

A Polywell is a nice toy. It doesn't scale well.
It's not feasible for power generation. If you scale it up the power requirements for the field grow faster than the power output.
The Tokamak design however does something interesting when you increase it's size. The power draw for maintaining the field increases, but the power output by fusion increases much faster. If memory serves well the power draw scales with the square of the size and the power output scales with the fourth power of the size.
Ergo, it's possible to make an effective powerplant by simply making the Tokamak big enough. However, to prevent expensive failures they had to start small. To learn. The ITER could be the last learning step. If it works properly then the next step will be to make a fusion reactor to actually generate electricity (or maybe add generators to the ITER). If it doesn't work as expected the first time it's started (more likely. It's research after all) then the ITER will give information on what to change in order to get it working.

Re:Improvement

[X0563511]

Sorry, "used to be a big fan" implied to me that you were opposed to it's continuance.

Re:Improvement

[jandrese]

In the end even if it is cheap to mine fossil fuels, they're too environmentally irresponsible to continue using in mass quantities going forward.

Re:Improvement

[lgw]

Says you. I remember the days before catalytic converters were common. Bad then you would have had a point - the air was actively dangerous in cities, and worldwide the problems were accumulating. Coal is just terrible without modern techniques that our bizarre regulatory mess makes is too difficult to convert to (back in the day, my college roommate was an environmental engineer - he actually left the field and found a new line of work, partially because the regulatory hurdles to doing the right thing were so high).

But modern cars are amazingly clean. Natural gas burns quite clean even without expensive emissions controls (and is now so cheap that it will be used wherever possible). It's gotten to the point now where people have to pretend that CO2 is pollution in order to keep beating the same old "your high standard of living makes you a bad person because pollution" drum.

Re:Improvement

[jandrese]

I guess if you want to pretend that Global Warming doesn't exist then sure, you can burn hydrocarbons until you run out of them from your arctic jungle compound.

Re:Improvement

[Sardaukar86]

Sorry, "used to be a big fan" implied to me that you were opposed to it's continuance.

Fair enough. I guess I've grown disillusioned both with the lack of political will to keep this thing funded and the sheer difficulties of toroidal containment.

It's obvious to most that real-world fusion power is the beginning of the end of scarcity for Humanity and it pisses me off to no end that when push comes to shove the powers that be would rather spend our finances and effort on less helpful endeavours that maintain the status quo.

Re:Improvement

[lgw]

I didn't think anyone still said "Global Warming", I thought it was all "Climate Change: we're still right even without warming!".

Anyhow, if is so happens that the Quaternary Ice Age is ending, we know what a warm earth looks like, and it's not some disaster. There's an economic trade-off to discuss - cost of replacing costal cities vs cost of trying to emit less carbon - but the science is very far from having precise numbers like that.

Re:Improvement

[geekoid]

Are you an expert in fusion? no? then you opinion is shit.
Keep that in mind.

Re:Improvement

[geekoid]

no, it isn't far off.
Insurancd companies are already using them.

"Climate Change: we're still right even without warming!"
since it's still warming, the only point I can see is that you want to show off your ignorance.

We know how ice ages work, so I'm not exactly sure you know what you are talking about.

A) Increasing CO2 is poisonous to us.
B) a run away green house effect means we die. Not hyperbole.

Of course, anyone who calls the Quaternary Glaciation the Quaternary Ice Age clearly doesn't know what they are talking about.
Also, are are in an ice age.

Re:Improvement

[geekoid]

Thanks for letting us know you don't know how science works!

Re:Improvement

[geekoid]

No, they weren't trivial at the beginning.

Re:Improvement

[KVM]

I remember someone in another /. says that the Curiosity launch is equal to 3.5 Iraq war days, its here: http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/10/14/2047227/support-for-nasa-spending-depends-on-perception-of-size-of-space-agency-budget Anyway I prefer polywell and dense plasma focus better because of the fact both of them are theoretically capable of direct conversion

Re:Improvement

[khallow]

Are you an expert in fusion?

It's an economics/reliability problem not a fusion problem. Let's consider ITER, for example. It's too expensive and plodding for use as a prototype. Cost is 10 billion euro with first plasma scheduled for 2020. At this point, I can say that it's about two orders of magnitude too expensive for a power plant prototype and the schedule is ludicrous. They should be starting construction of the next prototype in 2020. With such long construction/R&D cycles they're losing a lot of time.

The equipment list is an experimental physicist's playground, but it's a huge jump for a commercial power plant to use this gear (such as liquid helium cooled superconductors). I also don't see any signs of ability or intent to transfer that technology to commercial application. So we have extremely costly and specialized gear and no serious effort to apply it commercially.

Power is pretty high for a prototype - 500 MW for 1000 seconds. That may be a restriction of the fusion approach since you have to scale up a bunch in order to get to break even. But it still strikes me that power output is a good corner to cut - 500 KW for 1000 seconds is just as good experimentally.

Finally, what sort of power plant is going to come out of this? 10 billion euro gets you roughly 2-5 GW generating capacity of power plant, depending on country. That's the power output of a large nuclear or coal burning plant. And the next generation after ITER probably will be a lot more expensive.

If you're spending that much or more on a fusion plant due to the peculiar gear it uses, then you need a lot of generation capacity in the final product. That limits where you can fit it into a power grid.

For example, the current largest power generation plant is the Three Gorges Dam which has a generating capacity of around 22.5 GW. I think the way costs for the ITER lineage are going that any fusion plants derived from the approach are going to be considerably larger than that. That doesn't fit well with a power system that consists mostly of plants far smaller than 5GW.

I suppose things could change, but currently it appears to me that there's a trend towards cheap decentralized power generation rather than expensive centralized power generation.

I get that ITER is really a jobs program for physicists disguised as research into commercially viable fusion. It's still way too expensive and slow for that. You don't need to burn that much money just to keep some ivory tower and pocket protector types employed.

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

They should be starting construction of the next prototype in 2020. With such long construction/R&D cycles they're losing a lot of time.

That is actually the current plan. The follow up to ITER is DEMO, a plant that is supposed to be less about science and more about making an industrial reactor that actually produces electricity. Construction is planned to start in the early 2020s.

The equipment list is an experimental physicist's playground, but it's a huge jump for a commercial power plant to use this gear (such as liquid helium cooled superconductors).

Actually, the first half of that describes it very well, it is supposed to be a playground for experimental physicists so they can better understand what the plasma is doing and check that computer models are accurate, etc. A production reactor, or even DEMO, would lose a lot of the diagnostics or simplify them quite a bit. It would be built with the idea that the computer models are accurate, so that control is based on simple diagnostics fed into a complex model, instead of complex diagnostics fed into a simple model.

Power is pretty high for a prototype - 500 MW for 1000 seconds. That may be a restriction of the fusion approach since you have to scale up a bunch in order to get to break even. But it still strikes me that power output is a good corner to cut - 500 KW for 1000 seconds is just as good experimentally.

Previous experiments already have been done with fusion power in the 100s of kW and up to the 10+ MW range. They weren't break even though because they still required more heating than fusion power coming out, essentially brute forcing the fusion to a degree. To some degree, the problem comes down to there being a maximum thermal and pressure gradients attainable, so building a bigger device gives you more at the core. In other words, it is like adding more layers of insulation to something to reduce heat loss, with the insulation increasing the physical size.

Finally, what sort of power plant is going to come out of this?

DEMO is expected to produce 2-3 GW, while only being 10-20% bigger than ITER. Some early estimates do push a the price of a commercial successor to DEMO below the 10 billion euro level.

That limits where you can fit it into a power grid.

I don't think that fusion is being considered for use in low power usage, rural areas. Such areas should be quite serviceable by improvements in renewable sources we have now. A fusion plant would be intended for areas that have high power usage without taking up a lot of land to generate that power.

You don't need to burn that much money just to keep some ivory tower and pocket protector types employed.

You're right about that, in fact too right in a sense. Most of the money is going in to materials and construction, not science labor. If this was just about keeping scientists employed, we could have chosen a much easier path. Instead, ITER isn't about employing scientists, and in fact might be a large risk to science employment in relevant fields as budgets may slash ongoing research to come up with funds for ITER's construction. There is concern that when ITER's construction is finished, that too many scientists would have left the field to actually make use of it.

Re:Improvement

[bill_mcgonigle]

What good did handing $1T to bankers in "bailouts" do us?

But as a nation we seem incapable of spending on infrastructure these days. I think we've passed our peak.

Those aren't unrelated statements; the very best reason for fusion not happening is that the value of the USD depends mostly on the amount of oil that is being bought and sold and priced in USD. That's why Hussein's decision to switch to pricing oil in Euros was unforgivable.

The recent wars of the USG are most clearly sensible when viewed through the interests of the central bank and its owners.

Re:Improvement

[kermidge]

Not that it means all that much or is terribly pertinent, but Igor Sikorsky has been one of my lifelong heroes, going back to the Fifties. Everything I've learned of him since sustains that opinion. The man was inventive, persistent, dedicated, hard-working, and humble besides. (My only claim to private fame is that at the age of eight I managed to independently work out a linkage needed to control rotor pitch - the same linkage he arrived at. However stupid it sounds, I felt a certain kinship in that. "Engineering will out." and so forth.)

Re:Improvement

[khallow]

If they're still testing computer models, they could do that with far smaller reactors. And you bring up a good point with the opportunity costs of running one very large experimental reactor rather than a smaller one that would allow for funding of other fusion research projects.

Also, they should be looking at ways to reduce the technology requirements - such as using high temperature superconductors (liquid nitrogen temperatures are a lot easier to maintain than liquid helium temperatures and ease the engineering needed) and using a somewhat compromised vacuum (so that larger, cheaper, somewhat leakier vacuum chambers can be used).

Re:Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're still testing computer models, they could do that with far smaller reactors

They have been and are continuing to do so, with tokamaks varying from tabletop size to medium sized university ones to larger ones like JET, JT-60, EAST, KSTAR, and DIII-D. There are limits to how much information can come from smaller devices though, as they run colder, and lack effects that come from running a full scale burning plasma. Half of the trouble with the "fusion is 20 years away" thing is that scaling up designs uncovers new instabilities and problems, so eventually work needs to be done on a larger reactor. Not to mention a lot of the work that needs to be done involves interaction between the plasma & neutrons with vessel walls, which requires an actual neutron flux not achieved on smaller machines (to be complemented by work on projects like IFMIF).

such as using high temperature superconductors (liquid nitrogen temperatures are a lot easier to maintain than liquid helium temperatures and ease the engineering needed)

They are using high temperature superconductors. But superconductors have a critical magnetic field, and hence a critical current density, beyond which they lose superconductivity. The colder you make the superconductor, typically the higher the critical limit. So a lot of equipment, from MRI machines to LHC run high temperature superconducotrs at liquid helium temperatures so they can use less superconductor. Once at the point of running longer pulses, or stead state in the future, superconductors would allow for very low power requirements for the magnets compared to something with ohmic losses.

using a somewhat compromised vacuum (so that larger, cheaper, somewhat leakier vacuum chambers can be used).

High temperature plasmas are very sensitive to contamination form heavier ions. The larger the charge on ions, the more effective they are at radiating heat away and cooling the plasma (goes roughly with the square of charge). A lot of experiments have seen substantial increases in temperature by simply cleaning up their vacuum system. I've seen smaller experiments double or triple their temperatures by replacing oil based pumps with oil free pumps, and even high end experiments to ~50% increases in TFTR which helped it set a record at the time of about 10 MW of fusion power.

This is probably one of the less flexible requirements, at least because it is usually much cheaper to clean up or improve a vacuum system than it is to increase heating power, or to increase the size of the machine. Some efforts to improve vacuum conditions on experiments frequently gets treated as a "free" boost in temperatures and experimental conditions because it typically involves inexpensive changes and equipment. 10^-7 torr vacuums are kind of commonplace, established techniques, and at least at the smaller level, involve off the shelf equipment.

Re:Improvement

[lgw]

A) Increasing CO2 is poisonous to us.
B) a run away green house effect means we die. Not hyperbole

Ahh, disaster-mongering at its finest.

(A) is technically correct (which is the best kind of correct). We're at about 400 ppm. At about 40000 ppm, people would be dying.

(B) is quite absurd. There just isn't that mass of carbon available. We know what the Earth looks like with 6-10x the current CO2 concentrations, and it's not much warmer at the equator (it's far, far warmer at the poles). No boiling oceans, no runaway CO2. I'm not sure we'd even get "runaway" feedback below toxic levels anyhow.

Also, the phrase "green house effect" is a very poor choice of words (Morbo says "green houses do not work that way!").

The IPCC predictions from 1990 were terrible. Whatever quantitative hypotheses underlied those models have been falsified. Models continue to improve, and today's may well be making accurate predictions - we'll know in 20 years. Once we know we have reliable models, then a sane, rational person can start discussing the economic trade offs.

Jimmy Two Times

[Russ1642]

I'm gonna go check the papers for this story, check the papers.

Oh boy

[fiannaFailMan]

Here's an actual bit of steady progress in nuclear fusion which I happen to think is quite exciting, but cue the standard /. "it's not going to work because progress has been slow" armchair experts and smartass cunts in 5-4-3-2-1...

Re:Oh boy

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you learn how to use scare quotes properly?

Re:Oh boy

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the sanctimonious wankers like you trolling, with absolutely nothing to say about the subject itself.

Re:Oh boy

[symes]

A bit of skepticism isn't a bad thing when a lot of science gets hyped beyond belief. Or worse, poorly reported. Nuclear fusion could be one of the holy grails of science right now - it might transform our world unimaginably. I like /. because of this skepticism, it tempers my excitement... in more ways than one

Re:Oh boy

[MozeeToby]

The funny thing is, the people who used to say "fusion power is 20 years away" always ended it "with appropriate funding". The same people saying that said that it was 50+ years away with funding at then current levels. Actual funding levels have been below what was current when those estimates were made and significant progress has still been made. So in reality, their estimates were if anything conservative.

Re:Oh boy

[fiannaFailMan]

"A bit of steady progress in nuclear fusion" sounds like something on the subject to me. Did you miss that part, you amusingly stupid mucksavage?

Re:Oh boy

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, no sir, it's not going to work, because it's goddamn hard.

The ITER folks have a pretty solid plan how to stabilize a hot plasma. That may or may not work, but it certainly won't work in the next 20 years. Then they "just" need to find a wall material that stands up to bombardement with 14MeV neutrons, breed as much Tritium as they use, find a way to couple the reactor to a heat engine, which means extracting heat at at temperature of a couple hundred degrees, while keeping the superconducting magnets at low temperature, and clean the plasma of the produced helium. And the article is misleading: ITER will not produce power, it will only produce heat. At low temperature, to keep the reactor from disintegrating.

Some of these are engineering problems, a few are research problems. Regarding the wall material, it seems nobody has any good idea. Will it ultimately work? Sure, but probably not in our lifetimes. Will it be affordable? Not in our childrens' lifetimes. The difference from the early stages, when useable fusion power within 50 years was predicted, is that now they know how hard it really is.

Re:Oh boy

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, no sir, it's not going to work, because it's goddamn hard ... Will it ultimately work? Sure

Real interesting argument you've got there, going on in your own mind.

And the article is misleading: ITER will not produce power, it will only produce heat.

Has it never occurred to you that heat is a form of power?.

Re:Oh boy

[scarboni888]

Yeah and I'll learn something too since it seems the thread for it.

Re:Oh boy

[Eunuchswear]

Low temperature heat is a useless source of power, unless you want it for heating your house.

Cute - fusion powered central heating.

Re:Oh boy

[geekoid]

Out right denial and pessimism is not skepticism. Hell, it' snot even good opinion when ti isn't based in any real facts or knowledge.

Re:Oh boy

[geekoid]

Low temperature?
huh.

Re:Oh boy

[Eunuchswear]

The problem is that you can't let the walls heat up too much - or you have big problems with your superconducting magnets.

Yes, heat is energy, but the efficiency of the conversion of that energy to something more useful depends on the temperature. Bigger temperature difference = more efficient conversion of heat to kinetic energy, and from there to electricity.

Re:Oh boy

[Anonymous Coward]

They are limited mostly by the decision to cool the walls with water (without steam) and the materials involved in the blankets that absorb most of the heat. A minimum coolant temperature of 140 C is desired to reduce embrittlement of copper, with a typical output coolant temp of around 190 C, although higher on fault conditions. The copper heatsinks are expected to get temperatures in the 200-400 C range. The use of superconductors isn't really that relevant in there not being higher temperature coolant to run generators off of, and it is mostly because they want the simplicity of using water. The follow up to ITER would likely use helium so they when they plan to actually generate electricity from the heat.

Mod parent down, please

[fiannaFailMan]

The headline has been fixed. Stop modding up this shite, it's getting in the way of an actual interesting discussion.

Re:Mod parent down, please

[nitehawk214]

If they ever implement a comment edit system, he will be complaining about all the posts lamenting the fact that there was no edit system.

Smoke & mirrors?

[Forget4it]

hope this isn't smoke and mirrors like E-CAT seems to be now http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer

Re:Smoke & mirrors?

[0123456]

You only just realized that?

This is great news!

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Fusion power has been 20 years in the future for the last 50. Now it's only 15!

Re:This is great news!

[Anonymous Coward]

That means we're only 150 years from fusion power becoming a reality!

On track?

[Sterculius]

Can scientific breakthroughs really be scheduled? "Hey Einstein, could you give us an estimate on the Relativity thing?"

Re:On track?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hey Einstein, could you give us an estimate on the Relativity thing?"

Sure, but it depends on how fast you're moving.

Re: On track?

[djfreestyler]

And only if you're a spherical cow in a vacuum.

Re:On track?

[Valdrax]

Can scientific breakthroughs really be scheduled?

No, but engineering ones can be estimated pretty well. The basic principles are well understood. All that's left is building and fine-tuning. It's not like this is the first tokamak reactor we've built (see, e.g., JET & Tore Supra), and we're already planning DEMO to follow ITER as a sustained, continuous reactor. ITER is just a testbed for technologies needed to make a real reactor, like materials to resist damage from neutron emissions (in conjunction with work at IFMIF), plasma heating & vessel cooling, and a variety of other supporting technologies. ITER won't even have a way to generate power from the steam it produces. That's DEMO's job.

Re:On track?

[Sterculius]

So there is a clear path to actually producing energy with nuclear fusion? It has been theoretically possible for many decades, but the devil is usually in the details. I'm glad to hear that I will have my flying car soon!

Re:On track?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad to hear that I will have my flying car soon!

Sorry, but you were never going to get your flying car.

In some alternate universe where there was such an energy revolution, suicide bombers would be able to take out half the planet, anyway, so in some sense it's probably for the best....

Re:On track?

[Valdrax]

So there is a clear path to actually producing energy with nuclear fusion? It has been theoretically possible for many decades, but the devil is usually in the details. I'm glad to hear that I will have my flying car soon!

Stop being supercilious. It's like you've never worked on a major project before.

This isn't just pie-in-the-sky ballparking. This is a major engineering project with goals and timelines. It's inevitable that something will slip due to an unforeseen complication, and IFMIF may not come up with a usable plasma facing material in time for DEMO, but there is a roadmap and concrete steps being taken in that direction. Fusion research deserves a little more respect than "flying car" slurs.

Yes, the road has been long (30+ years long), but the facility has been under construction for 5 years now, first plasma is planned for 2020, and first fusion reactions in 2027. If you want a better idea of what they've been doing/will be doing in the 2008-2020 timeframe, see this slide. See also pp. 10 & 36 of this presentation.

Re:On track?

[rahvin112]

ITER would already be built and running if the US hadn't slashed funding in the 90's when congress went on a science slash fest. Europe now leads in high energy research because they've continued to fund projects like the LHC and ITER. It's very likely that if ITER is successful we'll be paying European experts to build our fusion power plants with European companies dominating the industry.

Re:On track?

[Neil Boekend]

Bah, you can have a flying car now. In fact, trebuchets have been possible since the middle ages.
Oh, you want it to land comfortably? That wasn't in the specs.

Re:On track?

[Anonymous Coward]

So there is a clear path to actually producing energy with nuclear fusion?

Google EFDA roadmap

D-T fusion

[Scooter_Libby]

According to wikipedia they are planning to use Deuterium-Tritium fusion reaction which makes the majority of energy through high speed neutrons: D-T reaction, which are notoriously difficult to extract energy from. Letting the neutrons bombard a stainless steel shell, which gets hot, heats water, turns a turbine, is the standard way to do things, but the steel shell becomes brittle and radioactive pretty quickly. I hope this actually solves something rather than simply being another method to use more exotic fuel, and reactor equipment, to produce radioactive results along with power.

Re:D-T fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

ITER does not solve the problem of neutron damage to the first wall. ITER will, over its lifespan, subject the first wall to only a fraction of the neutron load a real commercial reactor would have to withstand. We don't actually have the materials needed to build such a first wall right now, in part because a fusion reactor would be needed to generate the right sort of neutron flux to test the materials.

This is all assuming ITER works. Tokamaks have a number of problems, including the possible formation of intense streams of relativistic electrons during plasma disruptions. In ITER, if not mitigated in some way, the electron stream could become so intense it would explosively vaporize holes through the wall of the reactor, like some kind of science fictional beam weapon.

Re:D-T fusion

[0123456]

In ITER, if not mitigated in some way, the electron stream could become so intense it would explosively vaporize holes through the wall of the reactor, like some kind of science fictional beam weapon.

Then they've clearly missed an opportunity. Rather than trying to sell it to governments as a fusion reactor, they should have been selling it to the US military as 'some kind of science fictional beam weapon'.

Re:D-T fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

In ITER, if not mitigated in some way, the electron stream could become so intense it would explosively vaporize holes through the wall of the reactor, like some kind of science fictional beam weapon.

"Good news, people! The USA has suddenly decided to come back onboard the project!"

Re:D-T fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Letting the neutrons bombard a stainless steel shell, which gets hot, heats water, turns a turbine, is the standard way to do things, but the steel shell becomes brittle and radioactive pretty quickly.

Which might be why they are not planning on using steel to absorb most of the neutrons, and will be using blanket made of materials that are less of a problem when activated and potentially can be used for breeding more tritium.

Re:D-T fusion

[Valdrax]

Letting the neutrons bombard a stainless steel shell, which gets hot, heats water, turns a turbine, is the standard way to do things, but the steel shell becomes brittle and radioactive pretty quickly. I hope this actually solves something rather than simply being another method to use more exotic fuel, and reactor equipment, to produce radioactive results along with power.

Figuring that out a minor goal of ITER and the primary purpose of IFMIF, the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility.

Re:D-T fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they've settled on a beryllium/stainless steel blanket as the first test material and had to scrap plans for a carbon-nano-tube fiber based material due to restriction in funding. Ideally if the reactor gets up and running then they would be able to experiment with variations on all of these materials to find the best composite for use in DEMO.

Re:D-T fusion

[lgw]

I find that the most disappointing part of all this boondoggle. Fast neutron power is just a non-starter now - we'll never have public buy-in to "more radioactive waste" power systems. Plus DT can never scale down to Mr Fusion, so really what problem does it solve?

Re:D-T fusion

[EmperorArthur]

In ITER, if not mitigated in some way, the electron stream could become so intense it would explosively vaporize holes through the wall of the reactor, like some kind of science fictional beam weapon.

Then they've clearly missed an opportunity. Rather than trying to sell it to governments as a fusion reactor, they should have been selling it to the US military as 'some kind of science fictional beam weapon'.

You win.

I wish I had mod points right now.

Re:D-T fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Beryllium for the first wall with a lot of copper/zinc/chromium for heat sinking, and then steel for some structural parts. The idea is to minimize the amount of steel used, and use more of the other materials which have less of an issue absorbing neutrons.

Article on fusion power

[zyche]

While on the subject it's worth mentioning the article from Ask Slashdot which nicely and detailed answers most of the questions you may have.

Actually, this is one of the best content articles I can remember on Slashdot... The graph in the middle is simultaneously funny and sad. :-/

They got that the wrong way around...

[Anonymous Coward]

...should be generate 50MW of power from an input of 500MW.

Research translation

[ByteSlicer]

https://xkcd.com/678/

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[methano]

Fusion! The energy of the Future and always will be!

Putting this in perspective

[StripedCow]

From wikipedia:

The power production density of the core [of the Sun] overall is similar to the metabolic production density of a reptile.
...
At 19% of the solar radius, near the edge of the core, temperatures are about 10 million kelvin and fusion power density is 6.9 watts/m3

If even fusion inside the Sun does not produce any useful power output per volume, how are they going to get useful power outputs here on earth?

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core

Re:Putting this in perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the sun uses a fusion cycle unlike anything we will ever attempt on earth.

Re:Putting this in perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

My god! You've PROVEN that hydrogen bombs are a hoax!

Re:Putting this in perspective

[jo_ham]

You know how some cars use diesel, and some cars use gasoline?

Yeah.

But good question! I'm sure no one in the many, many, many years this has been studied by legions of engineers and scientists has ever thought to ask that question. I'll pass it on!

Re:Putting this in perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, the conditions in a fusion reactor would be rather different than in the core of the sun. The density would be about 100 billion times smaller, but the temperature would be 10-20 times larger. The scaling of reaction rates with temperature is not linear, while reaction rate is pretty much proportional to density squared in those ranges. So the higher temperature would give 4-5 orders of magnitude increase in reaction rates from the temperature looks like it doesn't make up for the 22 magnitudes of loss from density..

But the by far largest difference would be the use of a deuterium and tritium fuel blend. The reaction rate for DT fusion at those temperatures is about 25 orders of magnitude higher. Even DD fusion is ~23 orders of magnitude high reaction rate than pp.

Also for some reason you quote the power at the edge of the core, while it is estimated to be 200-300 W/m^3 at the core, which is the density and temperatures I am making a comparison to. While the power density in the core of ITER's plasma would work out to several MW/m^3

Re:Putting this in perspective

[Neil Boekend]

Because the temperature in the core of the sun is "only" approximately 15 MK and the temperature of the plasma in the ITER will be 150 MK.
And the sun does most of it's power generation in the middle of the core. Not on the outer edge of the core.
And the sun is not actively controlled, while the ITER will have microwaves emitters to stabilise the plasma to get the best fusion rates possible at the size.

In a car analogy: If a 16 wheeler can't do 200 miles an hour, how on earth would a bullet ever be able to do faster than that?

Joy...

[Sollord]

Base don this I fully expect to see the first fully developed commercial fusion power plant come online by 2130 given the track record for fusion research.

Re:Joy...

[roc97007]

In 2130 it'll only be 20 years away!

Re:Joy...

[0123456]

Base don this I fully expect to see the first fully developed commercial fusion power plant come online by 2130 given the track record for fusion research.

I think it's far more likely that, in 2030, Elon Musk will announce that Telsa have finally produced a usable electric car, powered by a Mr Fusion pack, at the same time as the government announces a new $100,000,000,000 project that will build a working fusion reactor by 2050.

Re:Joy...

[jklovanc]

How is that going to happen when the research into industrial scale fusion will be delayed till after 2028?

Eventually the aim is to develop steady-state plasmas, which will yield information relevant to industrial-scale fusion-power generation. It is experiments relating to the understanding of longer-pulse and steady-state ITER plasmas that are most likely to be delayed beyond 2028.

Re:Joy...

[Sollord]

Well around 100 years of research to get to steady-state plasma so another 100 years to develop a commercially viable power plant

Re:Joy...

[jklovanc]

I made a mistake. I read 2130 as 2030 so you are probably close.

Iter alternatives

[volvox_voxel]

It's too bad that there are currently only two alternatives -- laser fusion,which will probably never work, and the ITER that is a scaled up tokamak, both are exceedingly complicated and expensive. How does this compare with the Tandem Mirror Experiment, or the Axisysymmetric Tandem Mirror? I've read that the Gas Dynamic Trap axisymmetric mirror machine at Novosibirsk, Russia, has demonstrated plasma confinement with no turbulence, and that it's possible to generate electricity directly without the need to boil water to turn a turbine.. If you scaled this device up, how would it compare with the tokamak? Is it an inherently more stable platform, but less efficient? It's too bad that the numbers point to larger and larger Tokamak's to achieve fusion, but then we don't necessarily want a cheap source of a large quantity of neutrons..

Richard F Post has a lot of interesting things to say on the subject, and was one of the scientists behind the magnetic mirror experiment at LLNL, that was mothballed before it ever started due to budget cuts..

Re:Iter alternatives

[Iskender]

Richard F Post has a lot of interesting things to say on the subject, and was one of the scientists behind the magnetic mirror experiment at LLNL, that was mothballed before it ever started due to budget cuts..

A small clarification: Richard F. Post is an actual person: http://www.aip.org/history/acap/biographies/bio.jsp?postr

So, despite appearances, the above post is NOT "F. Post" troll. I'm actually a bit disappointed.

Re:Iter alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Mirrors are still a long way from the Lawson criteria, either with really low temperatures or really low densities. Some mirror designs are trivially simple in a sense to make into fusion reactors, but they would have to be at least several kilometers in size. Others have more complicated issues with assuming they will be instability free as things are scaled up. There is still research going into a bunch of magnetic confinement concepts other than tokamaks, but they each seem to have some of their own issues even if they lack some of the big ones found with tokamaks. Others still need to have larger tests done to make sure nothing new comes up, because some of the maturer designs had previously been at the point of looking "perfect" only to run into new problems for larger ones.

Re:Iter alternatives

[crunchygranola]

Not only is Richard F. Post not fictional, but he has a famous (or semi-famous) daughter: the actress Markie Post of "Night Court" fame!

Mod parent down, please

[bondsbw]

There's no way to edit Slashdot comments. So the GP has no way of saying "Sorry... it's fixed!"

Perhaps that should be viewed as a limitation of /. and not of a being that can't travel backwards in time.

sounds familiar

[HtR]

Being a /.er, I won't let my complete ignorance of this project stop me from commenting.

I have to say, though, that this sounds like what happens to a large scale basic science research project when a Project Manager gets a hold of it.

"Maybe regular status reports will help those discoveries get made on schedule!"

Thermal energy

[angel'o'sphere]

So, the fusion reactor will generate 450MW energy bottom line as hot plasma.
I assume transforming that 450MW thermal energy into roughly 200MW electric energy is left as an brain excercise for the readers here?

Re:Thermal energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Thermal blanket captures neutrons, gets hot, boils water, 19th century.

Re:Thermal energy

[tp1024]

No, it won't happen. It is an experimental facility and the planners didn't see fit to put some high temperature components into it. Very similar to the first fission reactors, power will be removed at low temperature to keep the engineering effort under control.

It's about the fusion process first, the power generation is easy enough and will come once the physics of the reactor is sufficiently understood to turn it into an engineering and financing excercise.

hard to get excited

[roc97007]

Forty years ago, I was a big proponent of fusion. My enthusiasm has petered out, sorry. I'm sure that science will be advanced by this project, but I've lost hope of seeing practical fusion power generation.

Re:hard to get excited

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder where the 3D printers fans will be in 40 years when not a single of their revolutionary predictions will have come to pass?

Re:hard to get excited

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait til one of these gets Stuxnet or someone leans on a red button and it escapes its magnetic shield and it burns a hole in the Earth and cause a change to Earth's rotational velocity then we'll be sorry. Just like Fukushima, baby

Re:hard to get excited

[0123456]

I wonder where the 3D printers fans will be in 40 years when not a single of their revolutionary predictions will have come to pass?

<1980>
I wonder where the microprocessor fans will be in 40 years when not a single of their revolutionary predictions will have come to pass?
</1980>

Hey, I wonder whether you'll be back here in 40 years to admit you were wrong? I'd better bookmark this story.

Re:hard to get excited

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why people keep comparing information processing with physical technologies as if there's some common ground? Hey, how fast was a 747 in 1980? How fast was it in 1969? How fast is it now? How fast do you think it'll be in 40 years?

Re:hard to get excited

[roc97007]

Well, that would be exciting.

Re:hard to get excited

[0123456]

I wonder why people keep comparing information processing with physical technologies as if there's some common ground?

You mean, microprocessors aren't 'physical technologies'? Damn, that's going to amuse my chip-designing friends.

And the 747 was, of course, a highly developed and mature technology for its era, so hardly likely to improve at the exponential rate seen in microprocessors.

But, hey, keep making completely spurious comparisons if it makes you feel good. I'll see you back here in 40 years.

Re:hard to get excited

[roc97007]

You know, you should have gone back to Watson's 1943 statement "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". It would have been a more entertaining point.

Ah yes, the Fulton's Folly Theorem. A discovery/technology that was disparaged but went on to be wildly successful/true held as proof that some other discovery/technology currently being disparaged will also go on to be wildly successful/true. I think I first ran into that reasoning watching an interview with Eric Von Danikan in the seventies, where he asserted in response to his "Chariots of the Gods" detractors that "they laughed at Galileo, too".

Well, yes, "they" did. And "they" were wrong. This doesn't constitute proof that "they" are wrong in all cases.

Of course, practical fusion is not even in the same order of magnitude as Von Danikan's hairbrained theories. But pointing out that heavier than air flight or speeds beyond 15 miles per hour would never come to pass, does not mean that any particular thing considered so will be proven to be practical. Logic doesn't work that way.

Re:hard to get excited

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder where the 3D printers fans will be in 40 years when not a single of their revolutionary predictions will have come to pass?

<1980>
I wonder where the microprocessor fans will be in 40 years when not a single of their revolutionary predictions will have come to pass?
</1980>

Hey, I wonder whether you'll be back here in 40 years to admit you were wrong? I'd better bookmark this story.

It's funny that you say that since fusion performance has been increasing faster than Moore's law.

Re:hard to get excited

[roc97007]

I wonder why people keep comparing information processing with physical technologies as if there's some common ground? Hey, how fast was a 747 in 1980? How fast was it in 1969? How fast is it now? How fast do you think it'll be in 40 years?

Precisely. I have a friend who used to work in aerospace. I asked why he didn't look for a job in commercial spaceflight? He said it's mildly interesting that space flight is getting cheaper and more practical, but in a substantial way, it's not getting much better. The efficiency of the Saturn V engines was up in the high nineties (I forget the exact number he quoted) -- 1960s technology -- and there needed to be a quantum leap to something else -- a significantly new type of fuel, or engine, or something -- before spaceflight would again show the substantial gains we saw in the sixties. We're on the flat end of the current technology curve, and what we've accomplished already is pretty much it for the foreseeable future, with goals yet unrealized. It happens.

It would be nice if we could extrapolate development from the steep end of the curve, but it doesn't always work out.

Re:hard to get excited

[roc97007]

I wonder where the 3D printers fans will be in 40 years when not a single of their revolutionary predictions will have come to pass?

<1980>
I wonder where the microprocessor fans will be in 40 years when not a single of their revolutionary predictions will have come to pass?
</1980>

Hey, I wonder whether you'll be back here in 40 years to admit you were wrong? I'd better bookmark this story.

It's funny that you say that since fusion performance has been increasing faster than Moore's law.

I'm glad you brought that up. To carry the simile further, Fusion hasn't produced a functioning transistor, yet. To show the scales in parallel isn't accurate -- the Fusion progress scale is way WAY to the left, before the point where multiple working transistors on a substrate succeeded in any practical way.

(Yeesh. Mix metaphors much?)

Re:hard to get excited

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you describe where microprocessors effect a physical force on par with the thrust of a jet engine? Are you really this dense?

Re:hard to get excited

[Anonymous Coward]

How fast was a Z80 n 1976? How fast was it 1990? How fast will a Z80 be in 40 years. Wow, much like your 747 it stays the same! Go figure.

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Fusion! The energy of the Future and always will be!"

Haha. That's good.

While I don't believe "It always will be", it is true that if past projections had been accurate, we would have had large-scale fusion power 30 years ago or more.

I'll believe THIS projection when they can achieve true break-even: when ELECTRICAL output exceeds all inputs (which includes all advance fuel acquisition and processing, etc.). So far nobody has come close to that. Until they do, this is still a pipe dream.

Here come the loonies

[benjfowler]

First person to say 'Farnsworth Fusor' gets a punch in the face.

Re:Here come the loonies

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, if anyone can make fusion work it's professor Hubert J. Farnsworth!

Bollocks

[macson_g]

Nothing is "on track". Only foundation has been build so far. Sure, all is on schedule, but the most difficult stuff is still ahead. CERN managed to accumulate some 15 years of delays, and ITER is 100x more complex.

What about lockheeds Mr Fusion?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor

Quite an interesting space.. fusion reactors are more or less just engineering problems and there are a million and one ways to smash atoms with enough force to overcome coulomb forces yet vast majority of funding is only going into the massive machines and or military bullshit (NIF) with no practical horizon for commercial viability even if they are wildly successful.

Have to wonder if the problem here is not so much engineering problem as it is the will to actually achieve best result possible vs more pedantic concerns of hoarding massive amount of funding on big expensive toys bound to keep you and your friends gainfully employed for years to come or maybe fusion reactors must be like particle accelerators the bigger the better. Certainly no shortage of crackpots and dead ends in this space which look superficially quite promising on the surface.

Keywords "hoverboard" , "quantum computer" and "fusion reactor" are to forever be considered vaporware until such time as they actually exist in this AC's opinion.

Re:What about lockheeds Mr Fusion?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Thanks for that, never heard of it and I tend to seek these things out.

Excuse me?

[new death barbie]

FTFA: "Crucial to that is getting to the point, scheduled for 2027, when the first nuclear fuel would be injected into the reactor. "

So... the first *actual attempt at fusion* is some FOURTEEN YEARS AWAY, but the scientists are confident they're on track...

Yeah, I don't think I'll get excited quite yet., Check back in fourteen years and we'll see.

Re:Excuse me?

[hAckz0r]

Its nice that they have such confidence in their design. Think about it. They will be switching on enough power to be equivalent to the gravitational pull of a star, and they expect no problems? Even the LHC had problems with cooling their magnets, and we _know_ how to make magnets. That was just scaling up what we already knew how to do.

Confining that kind of containment energy in an enclosed space has got to present problems unforeseen by any mathematical formulas. Its not like we have actually sent space probes deep inside stars just to see how to best contain their fusion plasma. We are after all talking about millions of degrees, where anything we could come up with, composite, alloy, or otherwise, will surely melt on contact.

Re:Excuse me?

[Anonymous Coward]

No nonononono. There's ITER and DEMO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO

Re:Excuse me?

[Anonymous Coward]

he point is to use magnetic fields. million degree temperatures are not that exotic. the plasma in a flourescent lightbulb is an example of that.

Re:Excuse me?

[Anonymous Coward]

They will be switching on enough power to be equivalent to the gravitational pull of a star, and they expect no problems?

That comparison makes no sense, as the forces involved in a reactor are a whole different scale and nature than that seen in a star. I guess playing sports and semi trucks have similar risks as they both involve things going ~ 60 mph.

Confining that kind of containment energy in an enclosed space has got to present problems unforeseen by any mathematical formulas.

The energy contained within ITER would be about on par with a drum of gasoline. It could make a mess of equipment it comes in direct contact with, but won't be a potential problem for anything beyond that. It doesn't matter how unforeseen things get, there is only so much energy in there to start with. The bigger risk will be working with high power electrical equipment and heavy machinery, which would be not that different than other industrial settings.

We are after all talking about millions of degrees, where anything we could come up with, composite, alloy, or otherwise, will surely melt on contact.

Depends on how much, how fast, and how dense it is when it hits the material. Plenty of table top plasma experiments can exceed a million degrees without really any potential for short term damage to components (slow erosion on the time of months or years is a different story). You can talk about how much hotter a match is than a ice, but dropping a lit match on to a 10 lb block of ice isn't going to do much.

Sorry for incorrect mod

[coder111]

Sorry for incorrect moderation. I'm posting this so that my moderation is cancelled.

By the way, do you have any sources for the claims regarding connection between time estimates & funding? I'm not saying I don't believe you, but it would be interesting to see more details regarding this issue.

--Coder

Re:Sorry for incorrect mod

[Anonymous Coward]

(I'm not the same AC.)

This graph has been mentioned in previous /. discussions on the topic. When I went looking for it on Google, I actually found it in this /. article.

Re:Sorry for incorrect mod

[X0563511]

Have you been under a rock for the last 30 years? The only place it seems funding hasn't been slashed is pork and Defense.

Re:Sorry for incorrect mod

[kermidge]

Thanks for that. I'd found it once, years back, lost my copy.

Just musing, mind, but I wonder which of various businesses would be opposed to what would in all likelihood become a source of plentiful and thus very cheap electricity.... and which of those businesses routinely is among the largest lobbying efforts in Congress both in terms of dollars and people, and which routinely makes consistently very large campaign contributions at national and state levels to members of both main political parties.

ITER is a disgusting, blatant SCAM

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.bibhasde.com/fusion.html

It's a bunch of fraudsters setting up jobs for life. They get paid a fortune whether they succeed or not - with the chances of them succeeding being ZERO. They continually promise jam tomorrow, while the TAXPAYERS have to pay for this nonsense.

Why aren't we spending ALL of this money on LFTRs? (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors). At least they work.

Re:ITER is a disgusting, blatant SCAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice link. It's good to see that the time cube guy has branched out into spewing uninformed nonsense about fusion.

Re:ITER is a disgusting, blatant SCAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the update, I didn't realise timecube.com had moved to a new domain.

Economically viable?

[WittyName]

Great if you can build one, but can you build one that produces power that is cheaper than nuclear fission, solar, wind, etc?

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[fahrbot-bot]

A fusion reactor would be able to power itself...

Sure can. Here's a working example.

Re: Why Didn't I think of that?

[Anonymous Coward]

> is still a pipe dream

a torus dream

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[sycodon]

2028, just 20 (give or take 5) years away...still.

Tell me again why we're not focused on thorium?

[gestalt_n_pepper]

I mean, fusion power, when and if it ever works, will be beyond nifty, however, the world has quite a bit of inexpensive thorium, working plants have already been built in the USA and are currently being build in China and India. Moreover, thorium fission, since it won't continue unless actively driven by a fissile material, is inherently safer. Meltdowns are essentially impossible.

Could someone please tell me what I'm missing here? It's not that I'm against R&D or fusion power, per se. I'm just not sure what the point of emphasizing fusion power technology is compared to thorium.

Re:Tell me again why we're not focused on thorium?

[aseth]

Because nuclear fission is SCARY! (Even though modern designs for thorium based plants passively deal with many of the potential issues.)

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[X0563511]

We probably would have it already if not for (deserved or not) proliferation paranoia and NIMBYs.

Re:Mod parent down please

[X0563511]

Don't you have anything useful to say, ever? Your comment history suggests otherwise.

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[paul.young.jeffery]

if i stick in this i may get a stick or too . seams legit...

Research is unpredictable

[Kim0]

Research is by definition: learning about the unknown, so the time frame will be unknown too.
This belief that progress of fusion can be predicted, or that development time can be predicted, is just a religious dogma of the ruling bureaucratic class.

Question

[fyngyrz]

ok, ITER isn't a production reactor. So it's not hooked to the grid, right? Not that pulses of 500 mw would be able to be utilized reasonably.

So -- what do they do with all that energy? Is there a huge bank of water cooled resistors nearby they dump the output into? Or what? There has to be a load of some kind, doesn't there?

Any ITER experts know?

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

So -- what do they do with all that energy? Is there a huge bank of water cooled resistors nearby they dump the output into? Or what? There has to be a load of some kind, doesn't there?

Any ITER experts know?

The output is thermal. They are not converting it to electricity. So they are simply dumping the heat into water, yes, but no resistors required.

Jam Tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

Same year we get flying cars and holographic optical disks that each hold Terabytes of data. Yeah, we know how this game is played. It is the same psychological reason futuristic Hollywood movies are always ludicrously set only a few decades from our present date.

Indeed, one can use such a claim to identify the phonies and conmen. If a company dares to suggest a close date, we know they know we can monitor the required progress, and therefore they are either telling the truth or telling a lie that will fall apart almost immediately. If a company sets a date in the FAR future, we know they are honest enough to essentially allow us to appreciate the uncertainties from day one.

2028 proves nothing but a complete and total con. Just far enough away to make current monitoring of progress pointless. Just close enough to engage full on wishful thinking in the minds of would-be investors.

Here's the inconvenient truth. WE HAVE NO EXISTING ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY, OR NO KNOWN PATHWAY TO SUCH TECHNOLOGY, TO MAKE LARGE-SCALE ENERGY PRODUCTION BY FUSION POSSIBLE IN THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE. Junk, small-scale, money-no-object, fusion projects are trivial to create. They EXACTLY the same value as current day demonstrations of flying cars and holographic disk storage.

For fusion to take off, we need an engineering (or scientific) breakthrough, and such things cannot be predicted. Could happen tomorrow- could happen in five hundred years time. What we do know is current attempts are flogging a dead technology horse, but make people's careers and fortunes in the meantime, which is why so many false promises are made.

The Russians prove that conventional nuclear technology, employing state-of-the-art 21st century engineering, is our best current strategy - most of the planet's current nuclear power tech is 1950s in origin. But our known reserves of coal, oil and gas have exploded since those times, and our technology for getting power from so-called fossil fuels has improved FAR faster than our technologies for getting energy from nuclear power. Anti-fossil-fuel propaganda comes from the same place as the propaganda that states that we should holocaust 'muslim' nations like Iran and Syria.

Now we can 'grid' and move electricity far better than before, we should NEVER build nuclear power stations in locations with ANY risk- and that means no coastal locations and no earthquake zones either. But while the masters of this world encourage sectarian strife, and war-fueling 'patriotism' that reinforces national borders, our chances of organising such things on a scientific basis are slim to none.

What about the engineering?

[anorlunda]

It takes more than science to make a power plant. It takes engineering too.

I heard that one must deal with temperature gradients as high as 1 million degrees C per meter to extract the power from a tokamak.

500 MW electric means 1000-1500 MW thermal. That's a lot of power. If it is radiated in a small volume, the power density is sky high.

  Is anyone at ITER even working on that problem? There is no guarantee that it is solvable.

Re:What about the engineering?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should get a message to them right away. I'm sure no one involved with ITER ever even thought of that problem! Thank goodness you're here to help. BTW, if you don't mind me asking, what exactly are your credentials that you have this level of insight?

Re: What about the engineering?

[Anonymous Coward]

power density calculations in any nuclear context is at least 2nd year college. But that is only because colleges force you to retake all your high school classes the first year.
So, it looks like he's qualified. But, this is all engineering, that stuff doesn't happen till the billions in theoretical fundsucking papers are done being written.

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Many fusion scientists are attempting to generate something called Alpha Burn. This is how atoms are fused around black holes, and only black holes. Most suns do not have the compressive ability to burn atoms, even at the core. Instead, the stars in the sky use quantum teleportation, then multiplying by umpteengazillion.

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what happens when aliens with big guns and healthy appetites that use love as a weapon see black hole fusion radiation coming from something not a black hole?
Is that the dinner bell for them?

Perhaps build it first?

[Lawrence_Bird]

ITER is about as bad an example of big science as you can find. Long delayed, far greater costs. I realize they need to set long term goals but given that getting the plant to run at all in the first place is not 100% certain, maybe they should keep focusing on that for now?

Woah!

[Arancaytar]

That's only fifteen years away, not twenty.

This is happening!

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[fractoid]

So why are they banging on about theoretically reaching "Q10" (which basically means 90% efficiency, if I read it right)? Even a reactor capable of Q1.1 would be usable, Q2 would be phenomenal. I can't shake the feeling that they're deliberately pushing their goal further into the future so that it's harder to measure their progress towards it...

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[rufty_tufty]

People always say that Fusion has always been 20 years away.
I believe it is much more accurate to say that Fusion has always been $20 Billion away. If Fission and Space travel had had the same funding history as Fusion then they too would also probably also still be perpetually 20 years away.
On the bright side ITER looks like it is going to break that impasse!

Estimates are just that.

[Anonymous Coward]

The New York times once printed an article around the turn of the 20th Century that estimated humans would be capable of flight. In a million years. They were being serious.

Events at Kitty Hawk happened a short time thereafter.

Even if that original 50 year estimate turns out to be half what it actually takes to get to profitable fusion generation, I'd say it was still a pretty reasonable estimate.

Re:Why Didn't I think of that?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Q factor in fusion has for a long time been defined as the ratio of fusion power to external heating power. And by fusion power, this means total energy going into neutrons and alpha particles from the DT reaction, not some form of electrical power. Another significant point is Q=5. Because the alpha particles that stay in the plasma due to their charge would reheat the plasma while the neutrons wouldn't, and the alpha particles only get 20% of the reaction's energy, at Q=5 the plasma is heating itself as much as you are heating it. Plasma completely heating itself would be infinite Q (no heating power going in), although for a practical electricity generating reactor, a Q of about only 20 would be needed, with some of the electrical energy coming out used to run the remaining heating.

ITER is expected to have a Q of 5 for longer pulses, but to get a Q of 10 by using shorter, harder pulses. What is needed are runs that are effectively continuous, with a Q of 20, which would need to be a goal for a follow up reactor (e.g. DEMO).

Re:Mod parent down please

[fiannaFailMan]

No it doesn't. My comment history has plenty of insightful mods. Fuck off.

Re:Mod parent down please

[X0563511]

I wasn't talking about moderations.

Is it just my paranoia

[bobvious]

that the only fusion projects that allow billions of dollars pumped into them are projects that under no circumstances will scale down to sizes that don't require many millions to build, and thus will always be controlled by big corporations? If the billions that were spent on the Tokamak and eventually the laser thing were spent on the other approaches, they might actually work, and might be scaled down to interesting sizes.

View from the inside

[Anonymous Coward]

ITER design engineer here.
First, a clarification: "generating power" is rather misleading. ITER, though it will generate ~10x more fusion energy than needed to start the reaction, will almost certainly generate no electricity at all - it simply doesn't have the heat collection pipes and associated turbines. That will have to wait for a demonstration power station, the first of which is commonly called DEMO in the field. As far as the EU EFDA roadmap (google it) is concerned, DEMO's likely to start construction ~2030.
Secondly, this announcement is a mixed blessing. It's an admission that the programme's really struggling to meet deadlines, a victim of a rubbish funding/organisational structure that puts it at the mercy of fickle government funding promises and greedy domestic suppliers, but it does show that STAC are keen to gun for the headline-winning targets of DT performance asap.

Re:Mod parent down please

[fiannaFailMan]

You were talking through your backside.

Re:Mod parent down please

[X0563511]

Hey, I thought I'd fit in better! You're just further proving my point.