Comments: 272 +- Hardware: French Fusion Experiment Delayed Until 2025 or Beyond on Friday May 29, @05:10AM
An anonymous reader writes "The old joke is that fusion is the power of the future and always will be. But it's not looking so funny for ITER, an EU10 billion fusion experiment in France. According to Nature News, ITER will not conduct energy-producing experiments until at least 2025 — five years later than what had been previously agreed to. The article adds that the reactor will cost even more than the seven parties in the project first thought:'...Construction costs are likely to double from the 5-billion (US$7-billion) estimate provided by the project in 2006, as a result of rises in the price of raw materials, gaps in the original design, and an unanticipated increase in staffing to manage procurement. The cost of ITER's operations phase, another 5 billion over 20 years, may also rise.'"
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Submission: Fusion experiment delayed by Anonymous Coward
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Someone just give this man some money.... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard
Even if he fails miserably its gonna cost a shedload less than all the projects like ITER around the world are
Re:Someone just give this man some money.... (Score:5, Funny)
And what kind of breakthrough would you expect from throwing money at a dead man? Or was that the implied joke?
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Re:Someone just give this man some money.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Someone just give this man some money.... (Score:4, Informative)
Specific results aren't shared, no, but there is a pretty active community. The project leader, Dr. Rick Nebel, shares what information he can and there are some pretty in-depth discussions between him and other people who are very knowledgeable about physics and fusion. The best thing though, is that they are very likely to have a solid yes or no answer on Polywell within a year or two and it's going to cost them a tiny fraction of what ITER and similar are costing.
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Re:Someone just give this man some money.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Crazy- this should be funded more to go faster (Score:5, Insightful)
So the Europeans and the US governments say they are firmly convinced of dangerous anthropogenic global warming but they won't spend 15 Bn over 10 years to speed this up?
If fusion could be made to work for 2-3 times the cost of coal electricity massively reducing C02 emissions without massively cutting energy usage would be possible. It's worth spending money to find this out. Bjorn Lomborg, who is loathed by most environmentalists recommends spending more on alternative energy research. Anthorny Watts would probably approve spending more on this kind of fusion research.
Surely if the US and the Europe, that would collectively spend about 700 Bn a YEAR on defence are serious about alternative energy this should be funded more.
Steven Chu where are you?
Re:Crazy- this should be funded more to go faster (Score:4, Interesting)
So the Europeans and the US governments say they are firmly convinced of dangerous anthropogenic global warming but they won't spend 15 Bn over 10 years to speed this up?
Probably because its not going to work. Fusion can only be made to work on a large scale, if at all. Every step along the way will cost the 15 billion you speak of and we are probably 100 years away from commercial production of energy. Wind, tide, photovoltaic and solar thermal power work right now. They can be tested on a small scale for a couple of thousand bucks then scaled up as far as you want in many cases.
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Re:Crazy- this should be funded more to go faster (Score:4, Informative)
Wind power only works when it's windy, and where it's windy, and not as efficiently as generally advertised. NIMBYs object to serious scale windfarms on land, and they kill migrating birds and cock up radar. There will also need to be a hugely expensive and unsightly ( or buried, and even more expensive) expansion of power grid systems.
Tidal systems are hideously expensive - estimates of UKL 23 billion for the Severn Barrage for example. And they have massive negative effects on wildlife too. NIMBYS are not fans of these either.
Photovolatic systems are unproven, but on a serious scale would probably involve enormous quantities of highly toxic chemicals. Like wind power, solar power is not available where the power is needed all the time, or even any of the time in many populated regions.
Barring a massive program of depopulation, there are no quick answers to power production vs climate change. Some or all of the three methods above will probably be part of the solution, as will be fusion power, fission power, carbon sequestration and other technologies, plus a lot of money. Anyone who says otherwise is probably selling snake oil.
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Re:Crazy- this should be funded more to go faster (Score:5, Funny)
Well, there's your solution.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah but where would you stick the bodies? That controversy would generate more NIMBY's and form an infinite loop - maybe if we burned all the bodies, we could stick some sort of steam-powered turbine on the fire and with our infinite supply of NIMBY's (bouyed up to excess with those NIMBY's who don't like the stench from the fire)...
Re:Crazy- this should be funded more to go faster (Score:5, Informative)
"Photovolatic systems are unproven, but on a serious scale would probably involve enormous quantities of highly toxic chemicals"
Photovoltaic isn't the only option for solar power though. This article [bbc.co.uk] about a plant in Spain that uses mirrors to collect light, heats water, which drives a standard turbine. This is basically last century's technology, very easy to do (relatively speaking of course), yet genius all the same.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So the Europeans and the US governments say they are firmly convinced of dangerous anthropogenic global warming but they won't spend 15 Bn over 10 years to speed this up?
Please note, that it is not 15 Bn to get fusion energy. It is 15 Bn for fusion energy research. The equations depends on the amount that such research would help. If there is only a tiny chance that the development of fusion energy would be a tiny step closer with this research, 15 Bn is suddenly quite a lot
Re:Crazy- this should be funded more to go faster (Score:5, Informative)
So the Europeans and the US governments say they are firmly convinced of dangerous anthropogenic global warming but they won't spend 15 Bn over 10 years to speed this up?
Please note, that it is not 15 Bn to get fusion energy. It is 15 Bn for fusion energy research. The equations depends on the amount that such research would help. If there is only a tiny chance that the development of fusion energy would be a tiny step closer with this research, 15 Bn is suddenly quite a lot
But it is not a "tiny step", it is the last and most important step that is supposed to iron out the last big problems with the design and materials before a grid-connected multi-GW power plant can be commissioned (that would be DEMO [wikipedia.org], now not likely to come on stream before 2040).
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Re:Crazy- this should be funded more to go faster (Score:5, Interesting)
for 10 billion, you can also construct 10 Gigawatts of wind power... which will eventually (within a few years) pay itself back.
Because 10GW of wind power gives you a LOT less energy than 10GW of nuclear. Typical wind power capacity factors are 20-40% (wind doesn't always blow), typical (fission) nuclear capacity factors are 90%-ish. Thus nuclear plants are cheaper than wind even if they cost 3 times as much per GW.
In addition, wind power needs additional grid investment and lots of pumped storage to even out spikes in capacity to be suitable for base load power, while nuclear power plants are suitable from the get-go.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In the mean time, there are a number of other very promising approaches which continue to be neglected, and these could be funded at a small fraction of the cost. What is very frustrating is that most of these have been around for a long time, and some were even cancelled so that our futile pursuit of Tokamaks could continue.
Such as?
Re:Crazy- this should be funded more to go faster (Score:4, Informative)
The reason the tokamak approach has been followed for ITER is that it is currently the most promising. Temperatures achievable in tokamak reactors are orders of magnitude higher than in other machines. Tokamaks have demonstrated fusion-relevant temperatures (~10 keV, 100 million degrees C) and net power gain (briefly in TFTR and JT60-U), and long pulse operation (in e.g. Tore Supra). Other approaches still need much more research before they get to the ITER stage.
The only other designs which come close are stellarators, and this approach is also being followed with this machine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
The main problem with stellarators is that they need very complicated coil arrangements (whereas tokamaks' are pretty simple), greatly increasing the costs. Until relatively recently (10-20 years), the computing power necessary to design these machines properly simply wasn't available. Wendelstein 7-X is projected to have a performance similar to the JET tokamak (which was built in 1982).
Non-toroidal designs (e.g. linear machines, fusors etc.) always have problems with loss of particles/energy along magnetic fields (end loss), primarily due to fast electrons. This is because non-toroidal magnetic field structures always have nulls or holes where plasma can escape: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem
Disclosure: I am a plasma physicist working on tokamaks
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Re:solving the problem is not the goal (Score:5, Funny)
Bullshit - it'll come from clean coal. That's completely different, because it's been... polished.
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I've got the promo materials in front of me... (Score:5, Funny)
and I swear, it's like reading the Duke Nukem Forever "reviews" that appeared when the product is/was/ vaporware.
"The ITER tokamak, 24 metres high and 30 metres wide, will be smaller than a conventional power station. It will produce up to 500 MW of thermal power in a toroidal fusion plasma of 800m^3 volume confined by strong magnetic fields. It will demonstrate prolonged power production aiming ultimately a steady-state operation."
In the words of wikipedia, citation please?
Re:I've got the promo materials in front of me... (Score:4, Informative)
In the words of wikipedia, citation please?
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnucmat.2004.04.004 [doi.org]
But seriously, with the hedging language in the statement you've quoted, there's nothing controversial. Note the "up to" and "aiming ultimately". (Plus "prolonged" in this line of business means a few minutes.) Fusion scientists are cautious people, having made rosy predictions in the past that never came to fruition. And when you're cautious, it's hard to convince lawmakers to hand over the money.
On the other hand, ITER as a concept has been around since the '80s. If they had just gone ahead with it back then, we would have learned a lot by now. Same goes for the cancellation of the SSC.
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I'll cross my fingures harder for polywell then (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'll cross my fingures harder for polywell then (Score:4, Informative)
Nebel recently claimed in an interview that he expects to know if Polywell will work or not in 18-24 months [nextbigfuture.com]. Not a long wait, really...
There are some other funded projects that might work (and some that probably won't). It would be good for the world if at least one did. Maybe it is time to buy shares in an electric car-builder...?
General Fusion [wikipedia.org] seems the coolest; steam driven pistons! :-)
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French Fusion aka (Score:4, Funny)
Freedom Fusion in the U.S.A.
Not "French" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not "French" (Score:5, Funny)
When (if) the experiment is a success, it will become a "US led experiment".
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Re:Not "French" (Score:5, Interesting)
Story goes, Democrats wanted to use their new-found power to add items from their party wishlist onto the budget. Bush gave a specific limit over which he threatened to veto. Instead of cutting back on new stuff, the Democrats had an overnight session and ransacked much of the pre-existing budget. That's also how Fermilab got into so much trouble, along with most of the DOE Office of Science (physical sciences) budget.
I guarantee you there were maybe 5 overworked staffers going over the budget line by line trying to reach a number their bosses liked. "ITER?" "Never heard of it." "It says, fusion research" "Cut it.".
Wouldn't you like to be the lobbyist who offers them a pizza?
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More like 2032 if you take into account... (Score:5, Funny)
5 billion? Chump change! (Score:5, Interesting)
Fusion (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea of fusion and benefits of fusion are tremendous compared to fossil fuels but I've always wondered how long will it last before it starts eating a significant enough portion of the hydrogen to be a concern. (Or possibly when the helium concentration will become high enough to be a concern.) I imagine that we have enough reserves of hydrogen in the oceans it won't be a concern for many many many years to come but it is an interesting thought experiment.
Ultimately the only "safe" power sources are those that derive their energy from external sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectric, and wave power; all of which are powered by the sun's energy and/or gravitational interaction with outside sources (aka moon). Granted eventually the sun will run out of hydrogen and we won't be able to use it as an outside source of energy. As long as we're burning things that have a finite source in the closed system of the planet we'll eventually run out or pay some unforseen consequences (Global Warming).
Not exactly the largest concern when it comes to alternative power but still and interesting topic to think about.
-Lifyre
Re:Fusion (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How much more difficult using a H-H reaction would be instead of a D-D reation or a D-T reaction as is used currently? D is moderately abundant in the oceans (something like .015%). My math skills are very rustly after 5 years of not using them at all.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty darned difficult:
http://www.tim-thompson.com/fusion.html [tim-thompson.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Thinking about it a bit more, in comparison, the ideal temperature for DT fusion is 15 keV = 174,000,000 K. I don't know what the pp fusion cross section vs temperature looks like, but since it's not in the tables of the NRL Plasma Formulary [navy.mil] it's probably not worth pursuing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"The idea of fusion and benefits of fusion are tremendous compared to fossil fuels but I've always wondered how long will it last before it starts eating a significant enough portion of the hydrogen to be a concern."
If your fusion powerplants are eating a significant portion of Earth's hydrogen, then it's time to relocate somewhere where the temperature is not high enough to boil oceans.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Boil oceans? If fusion powerplants are eating a significant portion of Earths hydrogen, then it's time to apply SPF 10^50 ASAP and get off this fscking ball of plasma as fast as you can.
Re:Fusion (Score:5, Informative)
I think you have some difficulties understanding scale. Let's take a look at an example fusion reaction, combining two deuterium atoms into tritium and a proton (note: This only occurs in 50% of deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions, but the numbers are similar for the other outcome, helium and a neutron). Deuterium has a molar mass of 2.01410178, trituim has 3.0160492, and a proton has 1.00727646677. That means, fusing two moles of deuterium gives a net mass change of 0.00487789323g. You can get the energy released from this directly by plugging it into e=mc^2 (ignoring momentum for this back-of-an-envelope calculation). The output is around 4.4e11 J. The current global energy consumption is around 5e20 J. To get this amount of energy from deuterium fusion, you would need to burn around 2e9 moles of deuterium per year.
2e9 moles sounds like a lot, but it's only around 1.1e9g, or 1.1e3 tonnes. It's around Deuterium is a naturally-occurring isotope of Hydrogen, and accounts for around 0.015% of all hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, accounting for about 75% of the total mass. 76% of the Earth's surface is covered with water. How much water would you need to get this much deuterium?
The molar mass of water is 18.0153, so you need 18.0153g for one mole, which contains two moles of hydrogen. We need just under 6667 moles of hydrogen to get one mole of deuterium, so we need about 1e13 moles of water. Now we're at some big numbers, around 2.4e11 kg of water. Because the density of water is roughly 1g:1cm^3, that's around 2.4e8m^3.
Still sounds like a lot? The volume of Earth's oceans is around 1.4e18m^3. At our current energy consumption rate, it would take around 5.7e9 years to burn it all. Note that this is longer than the current age of the Earth. Note also that this would only have a tiny effect on the oceans even after using all of the deuterium, since we would only be removing 0.015% of the hydrogen.
Of course, these are just rough figures. Fusion efficiency is likely to be low enough that we've only got enough readily-accessible deuterium for a few tens or hundreds of millions of years. It's a short-term solution, but only in as far as staying living on a single planet around a single star is.
Or possibly when the helium concentration will become high enough to be a concern.
This is even more funny. The reason helium is so expensive is because it floats to the top of the atmosphere and is lost to space if you release it. Having helium as a by-product of fusion would be nice, as it's currently in relatively short supply. Unlike other wastes, it's trivial to dispose of. Just let it into the atmosphere, and a short while later the solar winds will scatter it into interstellar space. It's sufficiently valuable that you probably don't want to do that, however.
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When I was in my teens... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also when I was in my teens, those of us doing physics and chemistry at our school were encouraged to do the radiation physics and radiation chemistry options because this would career proof us. It was just so obvious that nuclear power would completely replace coal. Unfortunately all those other kids planning to do arts degrees regressed into NIMBYs.
Personally I think we should stop pissing about, build a new generation of standardised U/Pu reactors and put the development effort into thorium reactors. That will buy us time, lots of time, since thorium is plentiful, in which we may be able to have an advanced society while we sort out fusion. Spending billions on a lot of "ifs" looks like engineer willy-waggling, especially when we have other technologies that actually work.
Meanwhile the Russians are talking about 70MW floating conventional reactors based on their icebreaker technology to open up the Arctic. At this rate, they'll be selling power on demand to the world while the West is still trying to get a net energy gain from fusion. Being sexy does not make a technology valid or useful.
Time to move on (Score:5, Interesting)
There's really no point in continuing with this experiment now.
I have strong confidence in the technical side of this project, meaning that I believe that ITER will work, and generate net energy. Unfortunately it's not clear to me how much we'll actually learn in that process; this is an engineering project more than a scientific one.
I have zero confidence that the ITER path (and related approaches) is one that will ever result in commercial power generation. The energy density of ITER is far too low to be useful, and the only way to improve that is to make more expensive machines. There's no evidence that the technology scales down in cost, and that any approach along this "big dumb" line is useful. Very smart people at the power companies have already given it a big thumbs-down.
This money needs to be turned to other projects. For the price of ITER we can fund a whole bunch of smaller science projects, projects that at least have some hope of being actually useful. HiPER is one that cries out for funding, but so does magnetized target fusion and the polywell. Unlike ITER, the physics of these experiments is not yet understood, but IF they do work then they are FAR less expensive to build. That is a much better way to spend research money IMHO.
Re:Baah (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we don't. We need fusion energy eventually. Fission energy is able to sustain our energy needs for the next couple of thousand years. We're just using it wrong due to concerns for nuclear weapons proliferation.
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Re:Baah (Score:5, Insightful)
Or we could have giant hemp farms to harvest fusion power from the nearest star, and then burn that in a hemp/steam power plant.
Bonus oil for biodiesel.
Currently easily feasible, no need to invent stuff that might not work.
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Re:Baah (Score:5, Funny)
Or we could have giant hemp farms to harvest fusion power from the nearest star, and then burn that in a hemp/steam power plant.
And best of all, there would be no "not in my backyard" syndrom. However, have we factored in the tax-funded muchies subsidy? That may be nontrivial.
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Re:Baah (Score:5, Informative)
The numbers involved in realistic energy production are so large, it's almost always worth doing some simple scale calculations. Consider a small nuke with 500 MW faceplate capacity. 500 MW times 365 days/year times 24 hours/day times availability of 0.8 (allow for repair and maintenance) is 3.504e9 kWh/year.
On the hemp side, a variety of sources give 9.0 dry tons/acre/year in temperate latitudes, 1.46e7 BTUs/ton, 2.928e-4 kWh/BTU at 100% efficiency, assume 0.4 thermal efficiency (traditional coal-fired plants are about 0.33), and availability of 1.0. These numbers are all on the generous side of their ranges. Multiply that and get 1.539e4 kWh/acre/year. Call it 227,680 acres to match the output of the small nuke. A square about 19 miles on a side.
OTOH, assume cheap low-efficiency solar panels. Assume daily solar flux of 5.0 kWh per square meter per day (parts of the US are better than that), efficiency of 0.05, and availability of 1.0. Multiply that all out and get 3.693e5 kWh/acre/year. About 9,488 acres to match the output of the small nuke. Overall, an efficiency gain of 24 in favor of the panels.
Sanity check: non-crop plants are about 1% efficient in converting solar flux to biomass, so a factor of 5.0 for solar panels; assumed thermal efficiency for biomass to electricity is a factor of 2.5 for panels; growing season of five months is a factor of roughly 2.0 for panels (five month growing season in temperate latitude, but it's the five months with greatest flux); that gives a factor of about 25 in favor of panels, which matches.
Dye-sensitized solar cells can be manufactured in a roll-to-roll process, have demonstrated efficiencies greater than 5% when produced in that fashion, and depending on advances in the materials that can be used, may drastically change the cost per watt for solar PV. And solar PV can use land that's much more "marginal" than what's needed to support hemp: deserts, semi-arid high plains, and rooftops.
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Re:Baah (Score:5, Interesting)
According to a BBC Horizon show, you are very wrong. We desperately need fusion.
Say equality is a force in world peace. Say you want Americans to cut their consumption in half through conservation and allow everyone in the world to have that lower standard by something like 2020 (global warming and all). The fission plant per WEEK built and the acreage of solar, wind and bio per DAY built would be astronomical.
In my opinion, that is why Obama is allowing Big Coal to continue topping mountains. Nobody wants to be honest about how demand outstrips probable clean supply.
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Re:Baah (Score:5, Insightful)
That was a good prog... shockingly mentioning that we spend more per year on mobile ringtones than we do on fusion research.
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Re:Baah - Patience (Score:4, Insightful)
I fail to understand why everyone thinks a project should be able to have a fixed timeline. It's dead easy to get fusion in a D-T plasma; it makes a good college level physics experiment, using a current induced pinch.
So the basic physics is understood. The engineering is not so. It takes a lot of effort, and a lot of knowledge, to turn a laboratory demo into an industrial process. Consider that it has taken a hundred years to learn to build refineries the way they are now, and improvement is still ongoing.
Worthwhile projects can take a long time, on a human scale. Plasma fusion is one of these projects, and may easily extend into the next century. That doesn't seem to me to be a good reason to give up. The USA is spending a trillion dollars on keeping bankers happy, surely they can spend a few lousy billion over the next twenty years on a possibly limitless energy source.
I understand why politicians think that a "project" should cough up results before the end of their elected term. The rest of us don't need to be that short sighted.
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Re:Baah (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Baah (Score:5, Interesting)
You should search for "Thorium fluoride" in the googletechtalks channel on youtube. There are at least two talks covering the subject, it really made me reconsider the nuclear option. In short, nuclear fission plants were *designed* to produce plutonium. It's actually an advantage when you're in a cold war race. But does it need to? Using molten salts, it is possible to let the nuclear reactions happen in a fluid, making really interesting cycles a possibility. And you wouldn't need to mine uranium any more.
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Re:Baah (Score:5, Informative)
Another good (informative and technical) general nuclear website: Nuclear Energy Institute (a.k.a. lobby) Nuclear Notes [blogspot.com]
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And bear in mind, that no nuclear fission power station turns a profit. Not one.
How about this one? [highbeam.com]
Re:If I were a French taxpayer... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fusion, if ever successful, is likely to revolutionise our society, and the only way its ever going to be successful is if investment is made.
What for-profit company is likely to make a multi-billion dollar investment that, even discounting the possibility of failure, it is unlikely to see any chance of a return on for 40 years? The only industries I can think that make billion dollar investments are shipmakers and aircraft manufacturers, and their planned ROI period is much less than 40 years.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The main issues for ITER are in the realm of plasma physics and materials science.
Currently, ITER is predicted to work based on arguments from "wind-tunnel scaling": make it bigger and certain figures of merit improve. This scaling is based on magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), but until the darn thing is built there's no way to know for sure whether the predictions are correct. Furthermore, there are "advanced modes" that aren't fully understood from a theoretical standpoint.
The "first wall", the inside wall of t