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."
Re:Pure Fusion power generation is a pipe dream (Score:4, Insightful)
"So our two working examples of fusion generation require fission."
Um no. The sun doesn't use fission. So not at ll.
"I would think that the future of fusion generation would be a component of fission generation."
How? What? Huh?
"You can have fission on its own, you can have fission and fusion together, but you can't have fusion on its own in any way that's economical."
Nope not really and wow... I mean really wow.....
The real problem is.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Once they get it working the funding will cease.
Re:I am impressed (Score:3, Insightful)
Or is it possible that since governments fund research, not solutions, that's what they're getting -- research, not solutions. Practical fusion will always be 50 years ahead, because that's what we are (inadvertently) paying scientists to say.
Re:Pure Fusion power generation is a pipe dream (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhh, what? It's actually pretty damn easy to create fusion reactions in the labratory merely using ions and electric fields. Of course they are hugely energy negative but it's not like these are our only two examples of fusion. Also the response about the sun indicates a complete lack of understanding about the different types of radioactivity and the relation between this and fission.
It's not like we don't have a detailed understanding of how fusion works. We know there is no fundamental law barring fusion power, the issue is all about practical generation.
Some perspective please... (Score:5, Insightful)
The EU spends way more than that on agricultural subsidies every single year. I'm probably a cultural barbarian, but I happen to think that developing fusion, even if it will take a while, is more important than subsidising French wine.
As for all those "fusion will always be 50 years away" remarks: that's what happens if you never start. ITER could have started a decade ago, if everyone hadn't been fighting over where to build it. Fusion would be ten years closer if we had somehow managed to select a piece of ground somewhere in a reasonable amount of time.
Re:How do you know until you succeed? (Score:3, Insightful)
In both of those scenarios the difficulty stays constant - only perceptions change. Nothing has become harder, they've just realised that they're not as easy as they initially suspected.
It's the same as people in the 60s who thought that we'd have intelligent robot house servants and flying cars by now..
Re:I am impressed (Score:5, Insightful)
Practical fusion will always be 50 years ahead, because that's what we are (inadvertently) paying scientists to say.
Scientist in lab: "Ha! Another positive energy run! Well, we'll just fudge the numbers so it looks like it took more energy to start the fusion than we got back. Can't jeopardize our funding..."
Nope, I don't buy it. Once fusion hits positive returns, there will be more money spent on it, to develop it to practical status. And the lab that first hits positive return will go down in history, famous forever.
Scientists working on fusion would love to succeed.
since governments fund research, not solutions, that's what they're getting -- research, not solutions.
I don't know how you can skip the research and go straight to the solution. If you know how, then please go do it for fusion, and make yourself fabulously wealthy as you solve all our long-term energy problems.
And if you don't know how, then stop bad-mouthing the fusion scientists. Kthxbye.
seriously (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I am impressed (Score:1, Insightful)
This argument is getting old...
Yeah, there's an untold number of scientist who would turn down a Nobel prize and tenure in favor of... tenure if not cancelled.
Right.
Idiot.
Re:100 years now (Score:5, Insightful)
Far as I know there's been no progress, even in the lab, since then.
Then perhaps it is time to expand your knowledge?
We have built working toroid reactors since the 1970s. Just such a reactor, JET, is mentioned in TFA. The problem is no longer whether such a design will work. Nor is ignition the problem; we've achieved that years ago. Controlled fusion exists, here, now, in the present. This wasn't the case in the 1970s (well, there were Farnsworth fusors and H-bombs, but those are both significantly different cases).
The problem now lies in getting net energy out of it, and keeping the reaction going over long enough durations to generate useful amounts of electricity. This is indeed physically possible (see for instance the centre of the sun), it's just very challenging from a practical standpoint. The engineering hasn't caught up, in part because the number of testbeds for new designs is sharply limited. ITER is supposed to be the next such testing ground for new engineering solutions, but as you can see, it's having trouble getting political and financial backing.
Also, this "fusion has been 50 years away for the past 30 years" meme gets on my nerves. It's selective perception, and utter bullshit. People remember the promise of fusion, but forget that we were politically and financially unwilling to pay for it. The research wasn't going to just happen magically, someone needed to underwrite it.
Had we done the needed R&D decades ago, we would be decades ahead of where we are now. We didn't. You get what you put in, and in this case we put in nowhere near what we ought to have. Result is that we're behind.
Re:Pure Fusion power generation is a pipe dream (Score:3, Insightful)
This reminds me of something Dr. Bussard said during his google talk:
"countless billions of stars in the universe all doing nuclear fusion...and not a single one of them is shaped like a donut!â
There are other promising possibilities for fusion; maybe we should be funding those, instead of the Tokamaks which cost billions upon billions, and are now 100 years away. Furthermore, even if they do work, they will never be economically viable.
Dr. Bussard's Polywell is one such approach, which thankfully, continues to be funded by the navy. If funding weren't so minimal, perhaps he would have lived long enough to see commercial fusion reactors using this concept. Even so, it looks like we should finally know whether it works within the next 1.5-2 years. Commercial reactors would follow shortly thereafter.
Materials, materials, materials (Score:4, Insightful)
Fusion is not 100 years away. It's already been achieved in JET, for example. What's 50-100 years away is a practical commercial fusion power plant with a lifetime measured in years.
In order to be practical, a fusion plant has to produce net power. ITER is expected to do that.
However, the materials issue remains. The interior of a tokamak, the "first wall", has to be able to withstand an intense neutron flux without degrading. ITER is going to be made out of stainless steel, which is fine for research; it wouldn't hold up very long in a 24x365 environment. For a commercial reactor, we don't have an ideal first wall material yet.
These cost overruns and delays over the history of the ITER program have been ridiculous. I'm not sure whether canning ITER is a good idea. Scaling it back might be, but the problem is, a new reactor needs to be significantly larger than existing ones, in order to explore a different part of the parameter space. Large = still expensive.
At this point, the most important part of the ITER program, IMO, is the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility. We need better materials.
Re:Have become more difficult to overcome? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hi feepness!
Thanks! You've given the best description of science I've ever read. Disclaimer: I am a scientist.
Seriously. A lot of the fancy topics are interesting because they are like a foggy mountain top, you know that there must be a mountain top, but you don't know the way, and you don't know what you will find up there, and which equipment you need to take along. This makes science different from engineering, where you at least would have a map of the mountain roads and altitudes etc.
As far as funding issues goes: what did the giant banking bailout of 2009 brought us for the future? That has cost us a multi-multitude of the ITER project and that money just disappeared into oblivion. With the ITER, even if it wouldn't work out eventually, we'd still end up with the new technologies and materials that were developed to build it.
Re:I am impressed (Score:3, Insightful)
The saying has always been that "fusion is still 50 years away", for fifty years ago and recent. Now EU has managed to make it 100 years away
You make the mistake of believing the summaries of Slashdot editors. ITER is not an "EU" experiment, but as international as can be (the seven parties participating in the ITER program: the EU, India, Japan, PR China, Russia, South Korea, USA).
(And of course fusion is not 50 years away, it was already achieved 50 years ago in Operation Ivy... Commercially viable fusion - now that's an engineering problem ;-) )