EU Fusion Experiment's Financial Woes Get More Concrete 173
fiannaFailMan writes "An international plan to build a nuclear fusion reactor is being threatened by rising costs, delays and technical challenges. 'Emails leaked to the BBC indicate that construction costs for the experimental fusion project called Iter have more than doubled. Some scientists also believe that the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome and that the development of fusion as a commercial power source is still at least 100 years away. At a meeting in Japan on Wednesday, members of the governing Iter council will review the plans and may agree to scale back the project.' Iter will be a Tokamak device, a successor to the Joint European Torus (JET) in England. Meanwhile, an experiment in fusion by laser doesn't seem to be running into the same high profile funding problems just yet."
NIF cost overruns (Score:5, Informative)
According to this article [economist.com], NIF has cost $4 billion so far - almost four times the original estimate. What saved the NIF from cancellation was that its backers persuaded politicians that it was vital for Americas nuclear programme.
Science at this level is neither easy nor cheap.
Re:Bussard (Score:5, Informative)
The latest Bussard fusion news, from yesterday [classicalvalues.com]. Fairly encouraging; it's hard to estimate exactly how successful the tests were but we can rule out total failure, I think.
I would currently place Bussard's success probability as much higher than ITER's.
Re:100 years now (Score:3, Informative)
For the record there are other Tokamak's, I believe the most advanced to date is KSTAR [wikipedia.org], which uses superconducting electromagnets, which are a critical part of ITERs design.