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French ITER Fusion Project To Take At Least 6 Years Longer Than Planned (sciencemag.org)

Posted by samzenpus on from the getting-an-extension dept.

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.

3 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But do we still need fusion? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The big benefit of fusion is that it has basically zero fuel costs and the potential to provide endless amounts of energy. But this is basically the same as renewables for all intents and purposes*.

    Fusion could produce power 24/365 while most renewables only produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows.

    But yeah, aside from that they're basically the same.

  2. Re:Cue the flood... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    one has to wonder if taking away a little bit from fusion research and giving it to research for batteries and renewables might be a better use of limited resources

    If you do that it will never end up working. Ever.

    Very hard problems require lots of money to solve. Batteries have been around for over 200 years, and are rather well developed. There's also strong commercial intrest in developing them further.

    Fusion is much less far along. One thing the government can do which corporations won't is long term strategically important things. Fusion is one of those, batteries are not, because there are enough short term advantages that other people will fund development.

     

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    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  3. Re:Cue the flood... by tibit · · Score: 1, Insightful

    With majority of cars being self-driving, existing road infrastructure will become so efficient that there'll be little incentive for anyone to desire an off-road vehicle - whether one that flies, goes on water, underground, on rails, etc. Road-based transportation systems only get congested because of human drivers. The same ones that argue that driving is a pleasure to them and that they'll give up manual driving over their dead bodies. As far as I'm concerned - good riddance. They want to make my life miserable for their please so fuck them.

    --
    A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.