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

But do we still need fusion?

[monkeyxpress]

There is an interesting talk on TED by the guy who started general fusion. Basically he shows a graph of the progress towards over unity production from commercial reactor designs since the 1950s. The progress has actually been surprisingly good, but the trouble is it has had to come from a long way back. If you consider that there is no fundamental law that makes the over-unity line special, it does seem like we are very close to crossing it now.

I think the biggest question though is whether these reactors will ever make commercial sense. 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*. In the end it will really be a competition of capital costs, and given how simple something like a solar panel is, it may require an even bigger breakthrough beyond just getting a commercial reactor going to make fusion viable. Of course if they can get the size of the reactor down then that will open up huge opportunities as a high density power source (ships, aircraft, spacecraft), but again, that is going to need big breakthroughs beyond just achieving over-unity.

*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.

Re:But do we still need fusion?

[Rei]

Geothermal power is more on the order of 40 TW, which is not far from power used by humans, a little less than 20 TW.

Not when you include enhanced geothermal. Its potential dwarfs human consumption.

Geothermal is one of those technologies that keeps slowly advancing without anyone ever seeming to take notice. It's the most underhyped cleantech of them all, in a field that normally suffers from way too much hype. Ironically it's been "dirty" energy extraction that's been helping them - the drilling technology advancements made by oil and gas companies are usually directly applicable to geothermal as well.

And some of the discoveries are accidental. Here in Iceland at the Krafla power plant they accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. Magma backed up into their well dozens of meters before stopping. Big screwup, right? Well, unlike the only other time in history this has happened (Hawaii), they decided "what the heck" and tried turning it into a production well rather than just sealing it. And it not only worked, this one well now produces half of the plant's total power generation (30 of the 60 MW). Its production temperature is 450C, which is crazy-hot for geothermal. They're now planning to do it again on purpose.

Re:Cue the flood...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all well and good, but it doesn't actaully invalidate the "fusion power still 30 years away" comments. There may well be good reasons for the slow pace of development (I'd assume that was the case anyway), but that doesn't change the fact of it. Fusion power was supposed to be a few decades away when I was a kid, and it is still decades away (even if ITER does get turned on in 2025, and achieves its objectives, which will take a few years, it's just a research reactor, there will be more years of work before there is a functioning commercial fusion reactor).