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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."
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.
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. It took a long time to decommission this small reactor in part as several bad things had happened to the piping inside it. Folks reckon the corrosion could have been fixed with a little tweak but you don't get to "tweak" sizeable reactors. Chernobyl 4 is a worked example of "tweaking" a large reactor.
China might sell you their CAP1400 light-water reactor design (an upgrade of the Westinghouse AP1000) or maybe their HTR-PM modular reactors; they're actually building one at the moment to test the concept and they have a small testbed gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor running at the moment. India is working on using thorium in regular heavy-water reactors as part of the fuel mix, not in molten-salt systems and nobody else is really interested in buying into what they're doing. Other folks are looking into pebble-bed reactors which can burn thorium as part of the fuel mix but the previous history of attempting this is not a success, mostly -- the Germans are still trying to figure out how to decommission their thorium-mix pebble-bed reactors. They've been filled with concrete for the moment to stop the leaks of radioactivity.
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.