ITER Fusion Reactor On Track To Generating Power By 2028 232
ananyo writes "ITER, the multibillion-euro international nuclear-fusion experiment, is on track to generate power by 2028. But some of the science that was supposed to happen along the way is going to be dropped to keep the vision alive. The plans form the main thrust of recommendations by a 21-strong expert panel of international plasma scientists and ITER staff, convened to reassess the project's research plan in the light of the construction delays. The plans were discussed this week at a meeting of ITER's Science and Technology Advisory Committee. The meeting is the start of a year-long review by ITER to try to keep the experiment on track to generate 500 MW of power from an input of 50 MW by 2028, and so hit its target of attaining the so-called Q10, where power output is ten times input or more. ITER initially aims to produce a Q10 for a few seconds, and then for pulses of 300–500 seconds, and work up over the following decade to output ratios of 30 times more power out than in, with pulses lasting almost an hour. Eventually the aim is to develop steady-state plasmas, which will yield information relevant to industrial-scale fusion-power generation. It is experiments relating to the understanding of longer-pulse and steady-state ITER plasmas that are most likely to be delayed beyond 2028."
Oh boy (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's an actual bit of steady progress in nuclear fusion which I happen to think is quite exciting, but cue the standard /. "it's not going to work because progress has been slow" armchair experts and smartass cunts in 5-4-3-2-1...
Re:Improvement (Score:4, Interesting)
$30 billion. How about some perspective [usdebtclock.org]. Or the $160 billion spent each year looking for new oil sources. $30 billion is like a bad joke. Let's go for that much per year for a while and move the test dates of ITER up from 2028 to at least 2018. It's past time to get this done, we're really dragging our feet. And while I'm ranting, where's the full size polywell [wikipedia.org]? We can do several things at the same time.
One thing is for sure, fusion will never work unless we actually try to make it work.
Re:Improvement (Score:5, Interesting)
Plans to build ITER started in 1983. That's 30 years ago. It was planned as a cooperation with the Soviet Union. Failure of the USSR to exist (and be solvent) when it neared realization delayed it. After new plans were made in 1996 or so, it took another decade just to agree on which country would have the honour of building it.
There has been little progress towards fusion in the meantime, because you need better fusion reactors - better hardware - to do that. As it is, the best hardware so far was build in 1983, the Joint European Torus(JET). There are some other reactors that are roughly on par with it (perhaps slightly better), but nothing that would mark serious progress.
When it comes to fusion reactors, size matters. When you build a reactor twice as big in every dimension, you will get roughly 8 times the fusion yield. When you double the magnetic field strength, it doubles too. ITER is more than twice as big as JET and has just over four times the magnetic field strength. The lack of progress stems from the deplorable fact that nobody has build anything in-between over the last 30 years. This makes the problems for ITER even worse, since there is now no experience in that realm and extrapolation of physical characteristics may break down at some point.
Re:Improvement (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the real world is rather more complex than elementary school level description - and the devil is in the details. A scientist friend of mine who studies high energy plasmas (but over on the astrophysics side of the house) says that "the history of fusion research is the history of finding ever more maddening and subtle ways that plasma can misbehave".