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Cost Skyrockets For United States' Share of ITER Fusion Project
sciencehabit writes: "ITER, the international fusion experiment under construction in Cadarache, France, aims to prove that nuclear fusion is a viable power source by creating a 'burning plasma' that produces more energy than the machine itself consumes. Although that goal is at least 20 years away, ITER is already burning through money at a prodigious pace. The United States is only a minor partner in the project, which began construction in 2008. But the U.S. contribution to ITER will total $3.9 billion — roughly four times as much as originally estimated — according to a new cost estimate released yesterday. That is about $1.4 billion higher than a 2011 cost estimate, and the numbers are likely to intensify doubts among some members of Congress about continuing the U.S. involvement in the project."
> "the numbers are likely to intensify doubts among some members of Congress about continuing the U.S. involvement in the project"
And so goes mankind's last hope of overcoming the adversity coming from the growing scarcity of energy.
End all involvement. This is a massive and pointless waste of money. It will never lead to any practical source of energy.
$3.9E+09.... about four days of Fed money printing.
Perhaps we could forego half a weeks worth of bubble inflation and fund it that way.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Jeff Freidberg laid out the cause of the problem at the last FPA Meeting.
How hard can it be to make a budget plan and stick to it?
Why are things costing more than estimated? Estimating costs is much easier than the science at work here.
$4B over 20 years is $200M/year -- does anyone in congress even track such a small amount of money? I bet that if a few congressmen looked under the couch cushions in their office they could find more money than that.
If they would have TRIED with something like LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactor) we would have something by now. They HAD a reactor working but moth-balled it in the 70s.
Bravo 1%'rs. Profits are in. Progress is out.
Within 10 years China/India will sell us thorium-based solution for a massive profit.
Just watch.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Why is it that it's the american taxpayer who has to fund these global bridges to nowhere while they are simultaneously called bigots/ignoramuses/warmongers by the people whose countries are also involved, but whose politicians are too pantywaisted to get their hands dirty? Hell, why does the US federal government think it has the privilege of operating outside the scope of a budget in the first place, driving up inflation and destroying future financial security in the process? This country should renege on any expensive treaty agreements until it has the deficit under control, or one day, there won't be a USA for everyone to fall back on when the going gets tough.
Even if the fusion project ends up producing viable technology, we can't afford the cost right now.
Along with manganese seafloor nodules, submarine rescue systems and the SSC. Two of those three turned out to be cover stories for "dark" projects. Anyone want to bet that in 20 years, fusion still won't be a viable energy source?
Fusion Power Plant For Rent : in a beautiful rural area, southern France, giant Tokamak for fusion experiments and (possible) energy production. Co-renting with countries from EU, Japan, etc, only 3.9$ BN! (not refundable)
Available fall 2020!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
Government programs have a tendency to have inflating budgets that often don't have anything to do with their actual purpose.
If we're throwing this sort of money at an international science project then I'd like to know that large sums of it aren't going to pay for hookers and cocaine.
And yes... that has happened before and I'd just assume not have it happen again.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It seems, ITER long ago disproved that at least this kind of Fusion can be cost effective.
This is not rocket science.
Yes, because throughout its long and storied history, America has never been known for inventing anything.z And tangentially, how precisely does one "steal" from an open collaboration anyway?
In short, your worldview is infantile, black-and-white, and in this case flat-ass wrong. Your understanding of capitalization and grammar could stand some work too.
It's ALWAYS been 20 years away. In the 70s... in the 80s... in the 90s and the 00s.
Every generation of fusion scientist has stretched out the timeline to coincide with their retirements.
They should have turned this Ponzi scheme over to the military and told them it was a national priority like they did with the Manhattan Project.
Suppose you and your SO were responsible for a joint home budget.
Now suppose that your SO were a psychotic lunatic who openly wants to destroy your relationship, while raving about how destroying your relationship proves that your relationship is broken. The last time you pointed out that paying the rent is a non-negotiable requirement, it ended in a hostage situation. Congratulations, this is basically the situation the Democrats in Congress are facing right now.
then one could argue that Europe's history of rape and pillage should excuse any hypothetical stealing of technology by the USA or anyone else. It's a popular argument around here
Overprinting and the neverending Depression mean that the US$Dollar is really worth about a quarter of what it was worth in the beginning of 2008. The continuing trend means that, to maintain real value, the nominal value has to go up exponentially. But it's a very, very bad idea to abandon the practice and production of technological know-how and expertise - and the off chance of a really great technological breakthrough (among all the "minor" ones). That could bring in a "fall of Rome" Dark Ages collapse in technology and knowledge.
Yes, because I am sure it was Clinton herself that lost the files and no one else would have been capable of losing them if they were in charge...But dont let logic stop you from being completely asinine.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
that's primarily the case because each decade since that time the budgets for fusion research have gotten smaller and smaller.
after the energy crisis of the 70's ending fusion research funding has only gone down.
You saying she wasn't in charge? Now a DNC staffer can be appointed to a cabinet level position, steal $6 Billion and shouldn't have to answer any questions on where it went? How much is Kerry now allowed to steal without any record now. Perhaps if people like you weren't giving people a pass for stealing billions there would be plenty to fund this project. Instead now we have a theif and someone like you calling me names for pointing it out.
I'm sure your mother is proud to see you sticking up for theives.
I'm all for lofty science projects with a moderate likelihood of failure but it seems like every one of these large scale projects of late fail to live up to their promises, don't provide significant scientific information AND cost 4 times what they were originally projected to cost. One of those conditions every other project would be quite acceptable but all three of them on a vast majority of projects? Sounds like either a massive waste of taxpayer money or a "legalized" form of embezzlement to me.
No "they" didn't have a LFTR reactor working in the 70s. Nobody's EVER had an LFTR working. There is no liquid-fluorine thorium Santa Claus, just a lot of grad student Powerpoint presentations.
Thank you for calling the Thorium hotline. YES THERE IS A THORIUM SANTA CLAUS! I've ridden on his sleigh, he even let me ring the jingle bells. Even if you are a sourpuss you are welcome to come along for a ride too: the Thorium Remix 2011. It's two hours long so bring some snacks.
I grew up amid Cold War fear and graduated to fossil fuel angst, coal concern. Then over the years I have witnessed a parade of 'renewable' wind and solar energy farm dreams where an absurd complexity of grid interconnect, tiny yields and moveable parts scales up to power -- a medieval society, maybe. A bad dream we should do the math and awaken from. So I resolved that our future should be nuclear... because modern civilization followed me home and I decided to keep it.
So it was with astonished relief that I learned that there was more than one way to do nuclear.
Dr. Alvin Weinberg PhD, one of the original patent holders of the Light Water reactor was slightly more than a graduate student. He was so obsessed with the idea that liquid fuels delivered greater safety and scalability, he sacrificed the remainder of his career in a vain attempt to convince the Navy (Rickover was running the show) to pursue liquid fuel and then, brazenly, went directly to the public -- a prominent scientist of the Atoms For Peace program warning about safety issues of water reactors was very embarassing. He soon lost the battle and his position as director at Oak Ridge.
I'm no diplomat apologist. I am pissed off by Admiral Rickover's lack of forward vision in 1973. With one phone call he could have prevented Weinberg's dismissal, preserved molten salt research and set human kind on a much better course.
There was a molten-salt reactor, a laboratory-scale device fuelled with U-233 and later U-235 in intermittent operation at Oak Ridge National Laboratories for a few years in the 1960s. It never used thorium and wouldn't have been any good if it had because it couldn't breed thorium up into U-233 to fission for energy.
Because the plumbing and the scale was wrong. They did not put a Thorium blanket around the test reactor because they already knew that Thorium breeding would work, and wanted direct access to the core to make neutron measurements. The ARE and MSRE were projects to prove that the chemistry could achieve criticality and remain stable... also refine the engineering.
In terms of ground covered between theory and finished commercial product, the 1965-1969 MSRE was an masterpiece 'hack' of high-tech (more chemistry than nuclear engineers were accustomed to) -- and low-tech (salt plug drain), delivered.
Anyone in any industry who makes such progress with a single experiment in so little time should feel rightfully proud.
There are also experiments going on to see how thorium works in regular light-water reactors. The physics says it will work, it's not as energetic as regular uranium fuels though. Baby steps baby steps.
Thorium as solid fuel in water reactors is 'several hundred years doomed' commercially. Uranium works better as a solid fuel and will not be scarce for awhile.
In regards to LFTR I respectfully think it's time to take big steps, big steps. As concerted an effort as those steps on the moon.
Corrosion schmoesion. We're not talking safety issues here in a system that carries high pressure, inherent steam and hydrogen explosion risk. LFTR will be just a bunch of standard bolt-together plumbing at normal atmospheric pressure. Replace and recycle everything every ten years until the corrosion issues ar
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Yawn, you can get back to us when the 100 billion lost in Iraq is tracked down.
Oh wait, you won't bother to care about it now.
Politics, your name is all over it.
20 years out?! They company doesn't state that. The government doesn't state that. The investors don't say that. Not even the critics say that. Every number I've ever heard says it's a lot closer.
I'd forgotten that "new nukes burn up all existing waste" is the new "duck and cover". Reprocessing creates MORE waste (it's a fuel recovery process not a waste management one), just a different sort which actually lasts longer so we can't just ignore waste management.
We'd be better off just managing the waste we have properly as well as building the best nukes for the job instead of pretending that it's part of a waste management system, especially since the best nukes for the job are going to be different to the ones that squeeze as much as possible out of old fuel.
Well this sure proves once and for all that traffic enforcement is all about money and has nothing to do with safety. If it were safety it wouldn't matter who was doing the speeding (aside, of course, from emergency vehicles hurrying to a legitimate call,). There;s no way they could ever argue now that the motivation is anything but financial.
Like I said, nobody's ever run a thorium-cycle liquid-salt reactor and there is no Santa Claus. As for a "thorium breeder blanket" add-on to the Oak Ridge reactor, huh? The LFTR concept mixes thorium into the molten-salt stream, breeds it up to U-233 and then fissions it within a moderator to slow down the neutron flux. There is no separate blanket, it's all in one stream, salt, kickstarter fuel (U-233 or U-235/Pu-239), thorium and waste products all at 700 deg C and more, mindbogglingly radioactive, radiochemically very complex and being continuously moved around lots of piping and heat exchangers and chemical processing plant and it has to generate electricity at about 5 cents per kWh to be competitive.
Any such reactor is going to require a neutron flux way higher than the ORNL reactor ever experienced, a mix of fast neutrons to do the breeding and slower neutrons to fission the resulting U-233. This isn't a problem for existing well-tested light-water and heavy-water reactors delivering about 15% of the world's electricity demand right now, of course. In their case the ceramic fuel sits in zirconium tubes and water circulates around them to transfer heat and in some cases moderate the neutron flux, no fast neutrons specifically required for breeding purposes (although some breeding does happen anyway). Much simpler and more reliable, no explosives required.
I agree that uranium will not be scarce for decades, at least one conventional and proven light-water/heavy-water reactor operation cycle of about 60 years. It's possible it would never be scarce at all if the process to extract from seawater can be operated commercially -- it's been tested, its cost is estimated at about three or four times the price of conventionally mined uranium today. Some countries don't have much uranium within their boundaries so ongoing supply is not guaranteed. India is one such country hence their interest in developing a fuel cycle involving thorium for their heavy-water reactors. They're still building and operating conventionally-fueled reactors too though.
If you mean better off as in somewhat cheaper, then sure.
But I'm a bit of a greenie myself, and I don't think we should leave some of this truly nasty stuff laying around.
And I didn't say "all"; yes there will always be some leftover, but you can get the volume down considerably. And yes some of the leftovers last longer, that's the point; the longer it lasts, the less radioactive it is.
Nationalism is the enemy of science.
Greed is the root of all evil.
No, the waste volume goes UP with reprocessing. You've been badly misled into thinking that reprocessing is a magic fix everything wand instead of a real way to recover fuel. I suggest you look out how it is done to undo the damage before you embarrass yourself more. Last I looked the web site for the facility at Harford (think that's how it's spelled) had a good description of how they make MOX fuel from old fuel rods.
It helps if you think about what happens to other materials in proximity with strong neutron sources - they become radioactive themselves. So the abrasives and other materials used to grind up those rods into tiny bits also become radioactive and the tiny bits spread out to contaminate a lot of other material. So long as you actually deal with that extra waste it's no big deal, it's just a consequence of getting the active bits out of depleted fuel.
Fuel recycling and waste management are unfortunately two different issues.
I'd like to know where all that fucking money is going. That's a lot of fucking money and the baby is STILL twenty fucking years away.
.. if it even shortens the path to viable fusion power even a little bit.
As for a "thorium breeder blanket" add-on to the Oak Ridge reactor, huh? The LFTR concept mixes thorium into the molten-salt stream, breeds it up to U-233 and then fissions it within a moderator to slow down the neutron flux. There is no separate blanket, it's all in one stream, salt, kickstarter fuel (U-233 or U-235/Pu-239), thorium and waste products all at 700 deg C and more,
There is no single LFTR concept. When you say there is no separate blanket you seem to be describing a one-fluid design. Weinberg's MSRE was never intended as such, it was a first stage in the development of a two-fluid Thorium breeder where a separate loop of fertile Thorium within the core breeds. The two-fluid design was envisioned by Weinberg as a best-fit solution to the management of long term waste products. I believe this is still true today.
When we scale massive I think a ~300 year waste storage is doable and worth doing.
Is that LFTR operating temperature of 700 C supposed to be a scare-figure? Are we comparing a fluid fuel technology that achieves its negative temperature coefficient of reactivity from its inherent design, where the heat-density variation of the fissile maintains this equilibrium -- with a water reactor model where sudden loss of coolant invites solid fuel temperatures to rise to 2200 C under explosive runaway conditions? Now that's a scare-figure.
The folks maintaining our water reactors have done a professional and stellar job to keep the water flowing all these years. I think it's time they deserve a break.
David LeBlanc gave a great little lecture on LFTR design topics at TEAC3 outlining the one vs. two fluid approach. In it he alludes to what LFTR designers call "the plumbing problem", in which ORNL's two-fluid design with its multiple tubes of fertile and fissile through the core promised to be a daunting challenge of engineering, thermal expansion at the various barriers being a wildcard that may affect the stable temperature coefficient they were striving for.
So LeBlanc has continued Weinberg's work by simplifying -- he envisions a "single tube within a tube" design where the ORNL's short and squat reactor with its many tubes in core becomes taller and thinner with a single barrier between fertile and fissile. If those illustrations leave you wanting more, here is a 2011 whitepaper that covers its advantages.
ORNL all but abandoned work on two fluids after Weinberg's time in what I see as a series of compromises where diminishing budget, increasing proliferation concern and (I'm being a bit brutal) obviously less concern about single fluid long-term waste products. Or (less brutal) perhaps they have an optimistic view that as we push into it we will become far more adept with transuranics.
In addition to a refined two-fluid design, LeBlanc is covering all the bases. He took the stage again in TEAC5 to promote the Denatured Molten Salt Reactor, which he hopes may be a 'best-fit LFTR' for now.
The problem is that so many things that seem to be best fits turn out to be compromises that entrench themselves, as have water reactors. My personal sympathies are with Kirk Sorensen in his quest to realize Weinberg's two-fluid LFTR idea with its LOW ~300 year waste impact -- I believe it may be a best-fit for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.
Until sustainable scalable fusion arrives
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I already commented, so I can't mod you up. Shame that.
There's nothing I can add to your flawless analysis, but it does seem to be a good time now, to point out a broader, basic reality.
There are exactly 4 real sources of power.
Geothermal. It's unlikely we could ever tap enough heat from the mantle to actually hurt the planet. So, unlimited; but hard to get to.
Solar. Easy to get to, but overall the weakest, flakiest, quite limited power source. We only get it in little daily drabs.
Carbon. Moderately easy to get to. Too bad we have to chemically release the carbon to get the power, eh? We'll just leave this one out, in the context of this discussion.
That leaves thorium and uranium, the stored power of past supernovas. No pesky carbon involved. Taken together, practically unlimited; but I'll give it a 'difficult to get to' rating. But not impossible, and it appears to be held up more by politics and ignorance than science.
There is no doubt that science can eventually solve every problem of mankind, including overly dangerous nuclear reactors. I realize that statement also includes clean fusion power, and that will come, ...someday, in the land of warp drives and tasty hats.
Requiring only few millions instead of billion dollars, aneutronic fusion is a more promising way to harness fusion energy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Although i largely agree with the idea that LFTR being no panacea. I was under the impression that you can breed with thermal neutrons with Thorium. Unlike U238.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Generally we've discovered that very high neutron fluxes (thermal, fast or a mixture of the two) in restricted volumes required for high levels of breeding in reactors and the attendant high temperatures tend to break things, cause leaks and fires and expensive shutdowns. At the same time reactors that work on the basis of moving fuel around (mostly pebble-bed designs) have not had a happy time of it even with lower neutron fluxes and larger working volumes in the core compared to out-and-out breeder designs. LFTR combines both of these iffy concepts.
Steam pipes leak all the time in light-water reactors, usually in the steam generators in the case of PWRs. This isn't a radiological problem as the cooling/moderating water isn't radioactive as it never comes in direct contact with the fuel and its waste isotopes which are ceramic pellets housed in sealed tubes. The steam loop runs at about 400 deg C or thereabouts at high pressure. In the case of LFTR and other breeder designs the coolant loop is at up to 700 deg C at which point most steel alloys have lost half their tensile strength compared to room temperature. Breeders that have broken their cooling loops in the past released molten sodium or helium but this had never came in contact with the fuel or its waste products so it was not particularly a radiological hazard. This is not the case with LFTR, of course.
Generally we've discovered that very high neutron fluxes (thermal, fast or a mixture of the two) in restricted volumes required for high levels of breeding in reactors
For uranium yes. As i understand a 100% thermal spectrum not only works for Th, but works better.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Light-water, heavy-water and carbon moderated power reactors only breed U238 up into Pu239 and Pu240 by "accident", so to speak. They get a few percent of the total energy they produce from fissioning these products in-situ. Breeders meant to produce surplus fuel or "burn" waste require much higher fluxes, usually achieved in a small physical volume hence the higher temperatures involved and the use of sodium, lead/bismuth, helium etc. to conduct away the heat. The LFTR concept requires this high flux density, whether of moderated thermal neutrons or a mixture of fast and thermal neutrons while at the same time having the radiological problem of the high-temperature fuel being less constrained in liquid form.
Thorium is not Uranium. 232Th absorbs a neutron in the thermal spectrum where it has a high cross section, decays to 233Pa which then decays to 233U with about a 30 day half life IIRC. That is one of the advantages of a Thorium fuel cycle. No need for fast neutrons to get a breading ratio of 1.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?