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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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:Why Didn't I think of that?

[methano]

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

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: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.