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French ITER Fusion Project To Take At Least 6 Years Longer Than Planned (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: The multibillion dollar ITER fusion project under construction in France will take at least an additional 6 years to complete, compared with the current schedule, a meeting of the governing council was told this week. ITER management has also asked the seven international partners which are backing the project for additional funding to finish the job. Under recent estimates, ITER was expected to cost some $13 billion and not begin operations until 2019. The new start date would be 2025.
I see lots of "it's X years away and always will be" comments below but no response to this. Why am I not surprised?
The "Fusion power is 30 years away and always will be" meme started around 1960 as a result of the British ZETA project, a Z-pinch system. When they got it into full operation, they indicated temperature readings of 1-5 million degrees and a level of neutron production matching the predicted values for those plasma temperatures. It was huge news in the late 1950s, as it meant that they were ready to make a demonstration power production reactor (ZETA II), and then a commercial reactor. They started development on ZETA II.
The only problem was, it was wrong. The matching temperature and neutron production levels were coincidental. The temperature readings were wrong because the high energy electrons were interfering with their spectral readings in a manner that had not been seen before. The neutrons were due to an unknown effect going on at tiny scales where instabilities at the edge of the plasma created enormous electrical potentials, acting as miniature particle accelerators and creating neutrons through spallation. This would have been obvious had they measured the neutron energy levels (random vs. consistent 14,1MeV neutrons) and directionality (directionally biased vs. random). And indeed, these measurements ultimately disproved the ZETA claims. The only issue was, they had to develop the technology to do so in the process - the technology to measure the directionality and energy of weak neutron fluxes wasn't available to the ZETA team. That's how immature the technology was at the time. Likewise, they had no way to know that plasma would behave as it did because the study of plasma behavior was very much in its infancy. Computer models would have helped, but of course they didn't have them then, and computers at the time were far too underpowered to do more than the most rudimentary of particle interaction calculations anyway, nothing like simulating plasma instabilities and neutron production through spallation interactions.
Fusion research, unlike fission research, was never given a Manhattan project. It gets funding, but never at the levels of "a relevant chunk of the nation's entire GDP". So it moves forward, but not through giant leaps - one can only test a few concepts at once, and the work doesn't race along. But plasma physics is a vastly different world today than it was in 1960. We have incredibly powerful computer simulations. We have decades of experience working with tokamaks, high power lasers, etc. We have far higher magnetic field strengths, which are critical to scaling down workable and affordable reactors. We have lasers for ICF and other related fusion forms orders of magnitude more powerful than those back in the day. And on and on and on. We've gone from Q factors that were a thousandth of a percent to greater than unity. And on and on and on.
Technology doesn't just show up when you want it to, or necessarily in whatever method you attempt first. The standard for radical, revolutionary new technology is that it's more often than not a long time between when the technology is conceieved and when it's widely commercialized, and full of initially promising starts that turn out ultimately to not work well. Look at, say, the development of the internal combustion engine. The earliest design was from 1661, and was based on gunpowder. Inventors tried and tried again - mainly with gunpowder, but also with everything from hydrogen to moss and coal dust - up until the 1800s where practical designs were realized and their usage took off.
This is normal. This is how technological development generally works. You have to gather knowledge and sometimes wait for other technologies to catch up to what you need (think of the limitations Babbage faced, for example, due to the technology of his day). Sometimes you may encounter promising starts, but hit roadblocks later on with your design, requiring a switch to a different approach. But ultimate
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*while fusion has the potential to provide more energy than harvestable insolation, this would represent a massive injection of heat into the biosphere and I doubt that would have good implications for climate change. It is also hard to imagine what we could possibly do with that much energy without causing serious issues.
Huh? An x GWt fusion reactor buts no more heat in the biosphere than an x GWt coal plant, fission plant, NG plant or hydroelectric plant. Besides, the effect of such has very little to do with climate change. It may impact local ground-based measurements, but only as a function of error. The effect on the climate is trivial.