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.

Comments

Re:But do we still need fusion?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Cue the flood...

[serviscope_minor]

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.