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New Review Slams Fusion Project's Management
sciencehabit writes "ITER, the international fusion reactor project in France, is reeling from an assessment that found serious problems with the project's leadership, management, and governance. The report is so damning that after a 13 February special session that reviewed and accepted the report's conclusions and recommendations, the ITER Council — the project's governing body — restricted its readership to a small number of senior managers and council members. 'We feared that if [the assessment] leaked to people who don't know about the ITER agreement, the project could be interpreted as a major failure, which is not what the management assessor intended,' says nuclear engineer Bob Iotti of the consulting firm CH2M HILL, who chairs that council."
...to fix it.
I've worked with CH2M HILL before, and frankly I wold trust anything they say without a serious double check..
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And whenever you think it will get closer, they come up with another reason why it will take another 20 years to be commercially viable.
Been that way since Expo 63.
Will be that way in 2099.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
From TFA:
Remind you of any super-costly projects in the US?
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is way over budget and behind schedule. This is no doubt partly due to the ambitious goals of the project, but the fact that it employees 35000 people carefully spread over the majority of congressional districts in the country might also contribute. It's hard enough to do the nearly impossible without having to budget proof the project by doing it in an extravagantly complicated way.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I honestly can't imagine why people try to "manage" something like this especially when you have all of these international partners each with their own agendas running the show. It's a subcontractors dream really, get a nice fat contract and have a big charge for changes/delays... I'm sure the subs are getting very, very rich right now off of ITER.
You can't build something this complex under the model that's being used and unfortunately ITER is an epic fail. Even back in 2009, people were warning of the problems with it and still those haven't been corrected apparently. Given that we're 8 years in, I think it's time to throw in the towel considering it was supposed to be a 10 year build.
For comparison, the closest model I can think of, the LHC and the international cooperation that built it, despite it's few successes has had numerous hiccups and failures despite taking decades to plan and build. If the International community really wants Fusion power they just need to pony up to one prime contractor to build it based on the input from a team of scientists and get rid of the carved up mentality of the construction.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
ITER is a all the proof anyone should need that the Tokamak is not the way to economical fusion power generation. Of course neither is inertial confinement fusion, while we're on the topic. It would be one thing if these projects were sold as basic science, but instead they are sold as being practical approaches to fusion power generation. It's a lie.
All the report has shown is that humans are greedy and the bureaucracy expands to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
Nothing in the report implies the engineering and science is impractical and uneconomical. This is a research reactor, not the final commercial product.
Unfortunately, your post is very light on "why" it is a "lie" or why it is uneconomical, so one must assume you are either lazy, or are trolling.
ITAR is a (...) project led by the French
Not exactly French. From the ITER site:
Three departments report directly to the Director-General Osamu Motojima: Administration; ITER Project; and Safety, Quality & Security. Click on the Organizational Chart below to find out more about the management structure of the ITER Organization.
and (picture)
Management greets staff on the first ITER Day in September 2011: Rem Haange, Department for ITER Project; Carlos Alejaldre, Safety, Quality and Security; Director-General Osamu Motojima; and former head of the Department of Administration, Rich Hawryluk
So, top management is made of
Director General: Osamu Motojima (Japan)
Deputy Director-General and Head of the ITER Project Department: Remmelt Haange (Netherlands)
Safety, Quality and Security: Carlos Alejaldre (Spain)
Or, look at the Organization Structure. No French in the top management
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Actually, ITER is supposed to be a proof-of-concept. That is, ITER is designed to show that a controlled and burning plasma can be created and sustained over a long period of time with a net power out (like any baseload power plant should). It's a toroidal tokamak simply because it is one of the most well-understood fusion reactor designs; spherical tokamaks, inertial confinement, electrostatic confinement, and (my personal favorite) stellarators being less so.
DEMO, another experiment, is the next step and is intended to be the bridge between ITER and a commercial design. What is DEMO is still up in the air, but it will definitely be influenced by lessons learned from ITER and other various research institutions (like, shameless alma mater plug, UW-Madison with its toroidal tokamak, spherical tokamak, and stellarators experiments).
Did you really need an article to figure that out?
I read about ITER as the future of fusion a decade ago in popsci.
The same article today would be identical.
And so would it be in 2024 when the mess is finally finished.
Meanwhile several different small scale projects that have emerged from obscurity during the last decade have put commercial viability goals within the coming decade.
A coal power plant that requires an olympic torch to ignite the fuel would be more viable than ITER.
Meanwhile several different small scale projects that have emerged from obscurity during the last decade have put commercial viability goals within the coming decade.
As someone who has worked on more than one of the smaller scale projects, I don't think anything is commercially viable within a decade. While many alternative designs offer a chance or at least hope of ending up cheaper than a tokamak, they will still require large scale projects at the level needed to produce electricity, likely with similar orders of magnitudes in costs in the $100M-$1B+ ranges. Except there is also more risks, as some of the things that had been figured out on tokamaks decades ago are being rediscovered on other machines, or finding new, different problems that need to be addressed. At least large parts tokamak designs are shifting to more engineering type problems than science problems.
http://www.generalfusion.com/
Mostly random stuff.
I remember the original ITER propaganda. Originally it did not have DEMO on it as a successor. It was supposed to be the direct precursor to an actual power plant. They added that afterwards. It has been nearly two decades since that and they still haven't built it. While some things did happen to improve tokamaks, like the superconducting magnets used in JT-60 and Tore Supra, or the improved plasma control and stability they demonstrated in D-III, the same problems still exist. You can only generate net energy with D-T fusion and the reactor walls can't survive the neutron flux of D-T fusion long enough for a viable reactor to exist. Until THAT gets solved you are not going to see any commercial fusion reactor. Even if they solved that it is going to be huge and expensive. A lot more expensive than a fission nuclear reactor. Unless they manage to make the plasma more dense or something.
"All the report has shown is that humans are greedy and the bureaucracy expands to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
that has been shown to be false over and over again, as a rule.
It happens, but nothing here, or anywhere, is proof its a universal rule, or even a natural by product of a bureaucracy.
Remember , humans invented bureaucracy so we can do complex things well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That still doesn't change the fact that I'm willing to bet my manhood on non-ITER derivates achiving commercial viability before ITER-derivates.
Why I can do that bet in good faith is that the ITER roadmap doesn't reach commercial viability until the end of my life, and with delays that always are inevitable on a project of this scope you'll at best recover my rusted balls of steel from my grave if the bet goes against me.
Well the saying is more a rule of thumb for how one should be aggressive in avoiding creating too many subdivisions in an organization, or trying to implement management and oversight where you should be trusting your existing delegates and granting them some organizational flexibility to achieve their goals.
I know I like to base my decisions of fundamental science on how flashy a website looks.
The issue with all the alternatives to ITER is that they are even less well understood, and less proven, then Tokamak reactors. Tokamak's have achieved Q > 1 - the plasma has generated more energy then was needed to heat it, and drive the machine. This is reality today in a reactor like JET, its just not practically sustainable on their sort of scale.
Things like the Polywell on the other hand? 13 neutrons in some iterations. Total. That's 13 known fusion events inside the entire machine. That's incredibly low (counts were higher in later models as I understand it). It's a promising but poorly understood device.
The problem is we have bad funding for fusion and plasma science all over. The issue isn't we need to redirect funding from ITER - we probably need to give it more. But we could also afford to toss $100 million at Polywell's to build a machine which is predicted to actually do Q > 1 and see what happens - then we'd know (slowly, we are getting there - it's a staged DARPA project which is being very cautious with their progress and whether the physics actually works).
Europe, Korea, Japan, and China are ramping up research efforts.
Great. So we should have fusion reactors on the grid any day now, right?
Not if you call them that!
Only if we're careful to call them "Fusion power plants", and not use words like "nuclear" and "reactor".
You know, the same way people are happy to get an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) instead of an NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), and they're happy to get a CAT scan, but would never go in for Computed Axial X-Ray Tomography... because X-Rays are radiation, but kitties are cute.
You really don't want the "bad adjective choice" protestors coming after your technology trying to shut it down.
I loved that propaganda. However having followed fusion progress across my entire lifetime I think it utterly dubious that it will ever be an economically competitive power source -- on earth.
We should become an electric civilization. The answer is wind wave solar and nuke (yes to Th -- why not).
However what I wish we could do is stop the pretense of affordability and build towards bold understanding of principles. This machine is vastly expensive and we should do it anyway not only for the sheer thrill of it all but to consider that we might want to make use of this technology some other way.
Callisto is a cold place for example. ConEd doesn't have a cable.
multi-billion dollar international project led by the French. What could go wrong?
French managed many big industrial projects on their own. To name a few: Ariane, Concorde, nuclear reactors and nukes...
I worked on fusion for years but no longer consider it relevant for near to intermediate term energy needs. The reasons are
1) natural gas -- enough for several lifetimes
2) renewables -- already becoming useful/relevant and if energy storage problems can be solved, a long term solution,
3) conventional nuclear -- in a crisis in which society's real needs exceeded its largely irrational fears, much safer new generation fission reactors could be brought on line in a couple of years.
Bureaucrat the world round fear being found out as being the useless tools they usually are. Spending lots of other people's money is fun. So the ITER is a dream come true. With a 20 year plus delay before they hit the on switch an established technocrat can basically turn a project such as the ITER into a MBA amusement park. With a budget that bit, nobody should notice all the conferences that are attended, officials wined and dined, and other expense account shenanigans that are possible.
But maybe my ravings are just that. But they are a hypothesis that can be tested. The worst thing that could happen to ITER would be that someone else cooks up a working fusion reactor using jukebox parts or for under a billion dollars. The second worst thing would be that some low-life engineer or physicist publishes a paper basically saying that ITER is about as likely to create viable fusion as Deloreans are to travel through time. So my test would be to see how much effort has been expended over the years to shut down viable projects and to silence critics.
The key is that if I am a genuine scientist then I want to see working fusion and I would applaud anyone who beat me by 20 years. But if all I care about is my little empire then it is the last thing.
My key complaint (of many years) of ITER is that it didn't have any significant fusiony milestones for a very long time as in a career finishing long time.
Then you have the simple sense of power that must have come with managing that project. You would have grant money by the truckload; so think of the best and the brightest grovelling at your feet hoping you will throw them (and their institutions) a few crumbs. I have been in many a scientist's lab which might have had a few hundred thousand in hardware an a few graduate students working for peanuts while those scientists desperately fought to keep the trickle of grants coming in. A blessing from the gods of ITER would be something potentially very corrupting.
If I were the Emperor Of Science, I would sell the ITER for scrap and disperse its budget to 10,000 different fusion projects with any that showed actual physical progress qualifying for further rounds of funding.
I am certainly not a physicist but I have worked on projects that smelled like ITER with distant nebulous goals and people who use big numbers to impress. But the reality is that these projects often get caught in catch-22 engineering (which is why they use big numbers to distract from the fundamental problems). Something like any material that is strong enough to take the pressure will melt and any material that won't melt can't take the pressure. The reality is that no amount of engineering bandaids and ducktape will solve the problem, the fundamental solution is flawed.
I can remember one data communications project. Basically they eliminated any kind of error correction from the transmission to enable crazy high speed bursts of data. But it only worked over a distance of about 5 feet. After that the noise started to start knocking off bits. At 1000 feet the data was untrustworthy. At around 1500 feet the data was clearly useless. This system needed to communicate over a huge distance. The simple problem was that they had promised to fit more data than such a low frequency could handle at that narrow a band for that short a time. There had to be error correction and it was going to eat bandwidth. But they had promised X data in Y time and X/2 in Y time was unacceptable. Then to top it off the people wiring it all together sucked.
I think that project lasted around 8 years; 7 of which were just basically trying to put a gallon of milk in a pint container.
It's providing jobs for tens of thousands of scientists, engineers and middle managers all across Europe for years to come.
So, no. Not a complete failure.
I hate bureaucracy as much as the next person, but it does seem to be the best way humans have found to institutionalize advanced knowledge to the point where very complex procedures can be handled by mere mortals.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
When they were deciding where to build the ITR, the choices were France and Japan.
In the spirit of compromise, the ITR was built in France, but headed by someone from Japan.
This was no doubt the first of an endless series of political compromises necessary to get the project moving.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You can only generate net energy with D-T fusion and the reactor walls can't survive the neutron flux of D-T fusion long enough for a viable reactor to exist. Until THAT gets solved you are not going to see any commercial fusion reactor. Even if they solved that it is going to be huge and expensive. A lot more expensive than a fission nuclear reactor. Unless they manage to make the plasma more dense or something.
From the ITER FAQ:
"How often will the ITER first wall need to be replaced during operation?
The current operation schedule does not include the replacement of the ITER first wall. However, provisions have been made for the possibility of changing it once during the lifetime of ITER, if necessary. The component which receives most of the power load from the plasma (the "divertor") will need to be replaced more than once during the lifetime of the machine. It has been designed specifically to allow this operation by remote handling. Individual components may also need to be replaced from time to time for corrective maintenance. "
Seems like your problem is solved.
The problem of finding the correct materials to build the walls with is certainly not fully decided yet but it is not the main problem and certainly not a deal breaker.
The main problem is about the stability of the plasma. Or to be more specific: that there would be sufficient rotation of the plasma to create enough heat to have a sustainable "burning" plasma.
Correction: for Polywell it's 13 registered neutrons. I've been following them and it _looks_ like scaling laws seem to work for Polywell, but it's also becoming more and more complex to build them.
Thorium LFTR is was fusion pretended to be.
Cheap, safe, efficient, clean.
Without costing a trillion dollars to develop.
Like not even 10 billion, perhaps 5 billion to having a LFTR production line fully operational.
When are we going to start to be outraged that we don't have the money to spend on money pits. Stop all fusion research now.
The problem with fission isn't fission in general, no corporations are interested in doing major, risky investment, quite the opposite, corporations are risk adverse, so we got the least efficient nuclear reactors, cause that's what the US navy decided to do !
We've been building tunnel diodes since the late 1950s. That's for electrons though... I don't see how tunneling can help protons.
Some enzymes use it; bioscience is frighteningly subtle at times. Not for fusion though.
Remember the total hatchet job that the MIT fusion lab did on Fleischman and Pons? The lead author later said that they published before they finished the experiments that the report was supposedly based on, using expected results as data. Regardless of what you think of cold fusion, the MIT hot fusion lab showed their colors in 1989. They aren't doing science, they are doing religion or something.
I wouldn't give MIT a bent penny for fusion research. They are known bad actors who care far more about ideology and funding than real scientific methods. "True believers" are never good scientists because they blind themselves to whatever evidence falls outside their pre-existing worldview.
ITER is at the wrong end of the scale - we need to get fusion working in a nanoscale device first, then refine it for printed arrays. Not this nonsense.
You know the joke: Economical fusion power is just 10 years away, and always will be.
The main contribution was turning a design into reality.