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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
Hello from Sputnik 2. I am receiving you.
Anti-gravity is more promising.
Yes, all that progress they've been making recently in anti-gravity research is bound to start paying off any day.
Oh, wait, no, it's all just charlatans and wackos.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
It's a project being built by multinational partners on a site in France. Obviously I can't comment on the spin until I've seen the polarity!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.