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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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".

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

[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: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

[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:Why Didn't I think of that?

[methano]

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

Re: On track?

[djfreestyler]

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

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: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!

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?

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.