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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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.

Re:Improvement

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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?

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?

[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: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.

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

[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

[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.

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. :-/

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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

[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.

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!"

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:What about lockheeds Mr Fusion?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

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

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?

[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: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?

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.

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: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: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: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: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!

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[TWiTfan]

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

Re:Mod parent down please

[fiannaFailMan]

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

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.

Re:this is excellent news about generating power.

[geekoid]

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

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.