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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."
$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!
$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.
I'm so glad you're smarter than all the scientists working on it.
On the other hand, how does $3.9B over 6 years compare to the annual cost of securing US fossil energy sources?
Reality of projects budgets 101:
If you give the correct high estimate, they won't give you the money.
If you give the fake low estimate, they will give you the money and pay extra later on because they're already invested.
Especially if budgets have to compete, they will most likely be too low.
When budgets are that high, nobody controlling investments really has a grasp of the value of the money.
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This is a massive and pointless waste of money. It will never lead to any practical source of energy.
All true. Besides, the F-35 project needs the money even more. ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
the government will never give you more than what was agreed on
Contractors routinely soak the federal government for billions in overruns. You happen work for a peon outfit that lacks the leverage to get away with it. France et al. have a little more pull.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
It doesn't even compare to the annual cost of securing face paint.
I've come to the conclusion that it's likely a scaling problem. IE once we can do continuous fusion(or at least pulse/'diesel' fusion fast enough for steady power), it'll be a matter that the energy costs will scale by the square, but power production will scale by the cube.
Going by the size of ITER, considering that many research nuclear reactors had generators hooked up to them but ITER has no provision to ever produce electricity, ITER isn't big enough.
We may be looking at needing something crazy like a 10GW facility before it makes sense.
(not an expert)
Personally, I'd almost rather put the money(and a lot of money from other sources, such as the F-35 program) to start building new fission plants - stop the majority of our CO2/power plant pollution.
Do the research necessary to develop liquid thorium to remove that restraint. Put solar panels on buildings south of the Mason-Dixon line where they'll do the most good, solar water heaters, etc...
Employing all the people it'd take to do this would help solve our employment problem for a long time, and it actually benefits the country.
I don't read AC A human right
the annual cost of securing us fossil energy sources pays off for the shareholders.
I wonder why they aren't the ones footing the bill?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
... Well, considering the US is a MINOR partner, they aren't in charge of 'the plan', which ... is costing EVERYONE on the project more money than expected ... well with the exception of the few countries that didn't lie about the expected cost of front ... which is pretty much SOP for science these days.
You can't show me any research project of any size building something that has never before been built that stays on budget.
The intentionally low ball it so they can get funding, then use the 'well, we've already thrown $XXX at it, which will be wasted if we don't throw another $XXX/2 at it ... and then, repeat that in next years budget. There is also of course the lack of adjusting for inflation that drives the budget up. They price it in 1997 dollars when making the request ... then start in 2008 ... even if they got the pricing right in 1997, inflation means its higher in 2008 for the same thing as 1997.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
No, its nuclear physics ... which makes rocket science look like 3rd grade math.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You think that a commercial scale Thorium reactor could be developed and built for $4B?
Yes.
Because fusion is hard,
and LFTR is easy.
Comparatively speaking.
The second one would cost half as much. The 20th one might cost as much as an airplane.
And using closed cycle Brayton it could be sited anywhere, even far away from a major source of water. And as far away from people, who tend to congregate around water, as desired.
The present regulatory apparatus, which is wholly oriented to a solid fuel water reactor technology that carries risk of decay heat meltdown, steam and hydrogen explosion, large scale venting of radioactivity -- needs to be reevaluated and adjusted rationally for this technology -- which carries none of these risks.
With due and fond respect for the things that helped us become civilized people... it is time to end the age of steam and fossil fuel.
___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
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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
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
You're compring the drive-away cost of a car to the entire R&D program here.
ITER is the R&D program.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The ITER is designed to do more than "break even", it's expected to return 10 times the energy input for heating and controlling the plasma -- a return of 500MW for an input of 50MW and to sustain this for periods of thousands of seconds. This is just heat, not electricity, there's no plans to try and extract energy from the system yet. It's an experimental platform, not a prototype power generating system.
Whether ITER succeeds in this aim we won't know until it actually runs. One school of thought is that bigger tokamaks make it easier to control the plasma generated. Pessimists think more problems will crop up as the engineering scale increases. That's why they're building it, to find out.
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.
"You could get the experimental platform for a couple of orders of magnitude less money."
No you couldn't, demonstrably. If they could build an ITER-scale reactor for one-hundredth the price they would have. Large-scale sustainable high-Q fusion is difficult. It cost billions to build and operate JET and it was never meant to beat breakeven (Q > 1) but it's come the closest to that of any of the major tokamaks with a couple of seconds of fusion with a Q of about 0.6 back in the 1990s. Heck JET wasn't even built specifically to do fusion, it was mainly supposed to be for plasma research but it got repurposed as plasma control and generation techniques improved. ITER, if it works as planned and the physicists haven't dropped a decimal point here or there, is a fusion reactor which will eventually run with Q >= 10 for several thousand seconds at a time. Maybe.
The "E" in ITER stands for Experimental. It's a testbed platform for trying out stuff and seeing how it breaks, a rig to make mistakes on and gain knowledge. There are nebulous plans to build DEMO and the later PROTO which will be power generating fusion reactors but they'll still be less than fully-commercial designs, just another step closer to the rollout of workable and cost-effective fusion power generation. Nothing is guaranteed though.
It's actually vastly, vastly, vastly underpriced and underfunded.
It is an absolute disgrace that fusion power hasn't seen the funding necessary to succeed given the importance of energy to modern civilisation.
ITER is a necessary step in the chain to produce working fusion power plants. It's amazing they've come this far while being funded with what amounts to hunting for pennies in vending machine coin return trays.
Here's a picture that paints a thousand words that makes the laughable troll headline of "skyrocketing" cost for ITER make the idiot who wrote it seem like he has trouble tying his own shoes:
http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg
Also note the scale on the y axis, and remember that the annual cost of the air conditioning the troops in Afghanistan is $20 billion.