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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."
$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.
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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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!
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.