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."
Improvement (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are sooo right. I've been reading "fusion power is coming soon!" for decades. Hopefully they are actually making progress and not just being more optimistic in their projections. With any luck, we won't run out of fossil fuels before they manage it.
Reminds me of an axiom of getting the status of software development tasks. "If a developer *says* they are 90% done," they are really only half way there. Or the one that says "The last 10% takes more than half the effort."
Re:Improvement (Score:5, Informative)
You are sooo right. I've been reading "fusion power is coming soon!" for decades.
When the first projection was made back in the 70s about fusion in next 50 years, it assumed that funding would remain constant or would increase. But what happened was funding kept getting slashed, over and over again. It would be like saying we'll get to the moon in a decade in 1960, and then proceeding to gut NASA of any resources. Then in 1970s bitching they are not much further along as they only had money for 1 sounding rocket and 3 slide rules.
To be even more frank, fusion *requires* that physical sciences and material sciences advance to a certain point. Cutting funding to such research makes fusion further away. And physical science research has been severely cut since 1970s. If it wasn't for the EU, Japan and China, ITER would not have existed in the first place. US has only shut down funding.
Sorry for incorrect mod (Score:2)
By the way, do you have any sources for the claims regarding connection between time estimates & funding? I'm not saying I don't believe you, but it would be interesting to see more details regarding this issue.
--Coder
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Have you been under a rock for the last 30 years? The only place it seems funding hasn't been slashed is pork and Defense.
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That just about sums up the history of manned space flight ever since we got to the Moon; certainly since the Shuttle.
Re: Improvement (Score:2)
Also, even with all the perpetually shifting estimates, it really does appear to be getting closer. It's not a case of "always 50 years away": 50 years ago, it was "50 years away"; 20 years ago, it was "25 years away"; now, it's "15 years away". That is actual progress -- not as fast as we'd like, or as was once expected, but progress.
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Recovering oil has become so easy (at current prices) that "supply is not an issue". Current oil prices are historically high, to be sure, but supply cost is unlikely to increase. Technological progress has made natural gas fantastically cheap, not more expensive. There's not really a "peak oil" scenario here - supply will keep increasing, just as it has kept increasing for decades, until something better comes along (which is certain to happen eventually).
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Indeed. Pretty soon we'll have an entire generation of scientists and engineers retiring after spending their entire life NOT generating power from fusion.
We should have scrapped the whole thing long ago.
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We should have scrapped the whole thing long ago.
Personally I'm very glad Lockheed-Martin don't share [fusenet.eu] your defeatist attitude.
A fully operational commercial reactor by 2027? Sounds like progress to me.
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They claim they'll have a 100 MW reactor ready in 4 years. Fundamental research kept secret from everyone else in the field, or utter bullshit - which do you think is more likely?
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They claim they'll have a 100 MW reactor ready in 4 years. Fundamental research kept secret from everyone else in the field, or utter bullshit - which do you think is more likely?
Your scepticism is the product of a healthy mind. Were it anyone other than Skunkworks or one of the NASA labs I think my own bullshit-detector would be have squealed.
I do take comfort in their relatively conservative estimate that another full decade of development will be needed to achieve commercialisation following a successful proof-of-concept in 2017. At least it won't be long before we'll know if this is fact or unicorn farts.
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It wont be a full scale operating commercial reactor.
It will still be a PULSED research reactor with no generators for electric power generation attached.
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It wont be a full scale operating commercial reactor. It will still be a PULSED research reactor with no generators for electric power generation attached.
Err, sorry - I was referring to the LM experimental reactor I linked to, not ITER's tokamak.
Although I used to be a big fan of the work, I'm pretty sure I'll never see a commercial reactor born of the ITER project in my lifetime.
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Although I used to be a big fan of the work, I'm pretty sure I'll never see a commercial reactor born of the ITER project in my lifetime.
That's no reason to abandon it.
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Although I used to be a big fan of the work, I'm pretty sure I'll never see a commercial reactor born of the ITER project in my lifetime.
That's no reason to abandon it.
I'm not sure why my conclusion read that way to you, perhaps I should have worded it differently.
I believe we need to pursue all reasonable avenues as far as fusion research goes. ITER has already taught us much, has a great deal more to teach us yet and the money spent on the various fusion programmes is peanuts next to the cash pissed away on the War On Some Drugs and the War On Terr'sm amongst others.
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..size of Rhode Island monstrosity that runs off unicorn horns and yeti farts.
That sounds like it would be worth doing on its own merit. :-)
Fusion research has made painfully slow progress and no amount of techno-masturbation, wish fullfillment, Iron Man fantasy makes it otherwise.
It sure has, but that's not entirely down to fusion is hard, we all know it hasn't received the funding it should, yadda.
What LM Skunkworks is doing does not appear to be anything revolutionary. Their designs are a completely believable evolutionary progression of the current thinking. Seriously, how hard is it to imagine one of these clever scientists having a lightbulb appear over his or her head, turning to a colleague and asking "I wonder how
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Your parents spent at least a couple of decades of their lives NOT producing you.
They should have stopped while they were ahead.
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Blame the politicians, not the scientists and engineers. [imgur.com]
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We have known the basic principles for a long time so how hard can it be, right?
You just mash some atoms together until they fuse. After lunch we will tackle time travel.
What makes this different is the international consortium of government funding of the project to the tune of $30 BILLION.
Call me naive, but I believe this is going to happen. On time and on budget, well, that is a different question.
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What makes this different is the international consortium of government funding of the project to the tune of $30 BILLION.
I'm sure usable fusion reactors will be built at some point this century. I'm equally sure that they won't be developed by governments throwing money at people with a decades-long record of failure.
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And I am equally sure that whoever does figure out commercially viable fusion will owe a great debt to the cost-overridden, government-funded nuclear and plasma research that preceded it. Whether it is actually acknowledged ... well ... I'll settle for being able to keep the lights on without melting the planet.
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It is not a project with a decades-long record in failure. Actually they are very successful. However the public mind always thaught a commercial (working) version would just be around the next corner.
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It is not a project with a decades-long record in failure. Actually they are very successful.
At what?
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Look at what it took with the US to make nuclear fission with the Manhattan Project. Sometimes the only way to get something to work is to throw enough money at it, that just sheer force of capital, it gets done.
Call me naive as well, but look at the payoff: Global warming slowed (manufacturing goods still will spew CO2, but burning coal and other stuff would be stopped.) Desalination would become easy so field would be irrigated regardless of how fickle the weather gets. Oil and gas still have a use (p
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Look at what it took with the US to make nuclear fission with the Manhattan Project. Sometimes the only way to get something to work is to throw enough money at it, that just sheer force of capital, it gets done.
That wasn't 'making nuclear fission work'. That was making nuclear bombs work.
Fission reactors were essentially trivial: pile up enough moderately enriched uranium and it starts fissioning on its own.
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Which, although perhaps technically easier, wasn't exactly cheap, either. It was also heavily funded and subsidized by governments. If left solely to the private sector to be developed and proven, it probably still would have happened, but who knows when and in what form.
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Which, although perhaps technically easier, wasn't exactly cheap, either. It was also heavily funded and subsidized by governments.
Which merely brought it ahead by a few years.
If left solely to the private sector to be developed and proven, it probably still would have happened, but who knows when and in what form.
Almost certainly not the form which produced Chernobyl and Fukupishima.
There are much better and safer reactor designs, but only if you don't want to use them to make plutonium for nuclear bombs.
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It is not just willingness to through money at the problem, but to cut through the red tape. At one point in the Manhattan project they needed the use of a large amount of silver (6,000 tons) to build the magnets for one of the Uranium processing plants at Oak Ridge TN (There was a war time shortage of Copper) So they "borrowed it from the U.S. Treasury, a mid level procurement officer went to Washington with a a letter saying a AAA priority war project needed it,...
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.
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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".
Re:Improvement (Score:5, Insightful)
Those were my thoughts as well, but it's worth pointing out that if the US had poured $1T into fusion research instead of an Iraq War, we might be looking at 5 years out instead.
The false assumption there was that the Middle East oil was the primary motivation for the war (rather than the pricing of that oil), so it doesn't really make direct sense, but if we had better people running the society, better things would happen.
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It's not like we couldn't do both - US government spending is in no way limited by funding these days. And, heck, maybe the Iraq war did some little good: Iraq is still holding itself together as a democracy, however tenuously. What good did handing $1T to bankers in "bailouts" do us?
But as a nation we seem incapable of spending on infrastructure these days. I think we've passed our peak.
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Even this one does not say we will be using electricity generated by fusion power in 15 years
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.
Basically they say they can generate power by 2028 but not at a scale that can be used industrially. Even the research on industrial scale will have to wait till after that and there is no estimate on how long it will take. They didn't shorten th time; they just changed the target. There is a big difference between "generate power" and "generate power in an industrial scale and decrease reliance on fossil fuels".
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.
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Fusion power has been 20 years away for something like 60 years now. It is progress that we're down to only 15 years away. Hopefully by 2053 we'll be down to just 10 years away.
No, you misunderstand. ITER is not predicting fusion power in 15 years. They are predicting a gigantic laboratory experiment that will: Not. Produce. Any. Electricity. Whatsoever.
ITER declares itself to be a model for a far more expensive fusion prototype power plant called DEMO [iter.org] for which even the conceptual design will not be seen for years, and could not produce grid electricity before the 2040s, which is, wait for it, still more than 25 years away!
Once DEMO has been built and has been put into operation
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Wow, every single time I criticize or make a light out of energy businesses or nuclear power, I get modded down. Seriously!
You guys are all over Slashdot, aren't you?
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...
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A bit of skepticism isn't a bad thing when a lot of science gets hyped beyond belief. Or worse, poorly reported. Nuclear fusion could be one of the holy grails of science right now - it might transform our world unimaginably. I like /. because of this skepticism, it tempers my excitement... in more ways than one
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The funny thing is, the people who used to say "fusion power is 20 years away" always ended it "with appropriate funding". The same people saying that said that it was 50+ years away with funding at then current levels. Actual funding levels have been below what was current when those estimates were made and significant progress has still been made. So in reality, their estimates were if anything conservative.
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Yeah and I'll learn something too since it seems the thread for it.
D-T fusion (Score:2)
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Letting the neutrons bombard a stainless steel shell, which gets hot, heats water, turns a turbine, is the standard way to do things, but the steel shell becomes brittle and radioactive pretty quickly. I hope this actually solves something rather than simply being another method to use more exotic fuel, and reactor equipment, to produce radioactive results along with power.
Figuring that out a minor goal of ITER and the primary purpose of IFMIF, the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility. [wikipedia.org]
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I find that the most disappointing part of all this boondoggle. Fast neutron power is just a non-starter now - we'll never have public buy-in to "more radioactive waste" power systems. Plus DT can never scale down to Mr Fusion, so really what problem does it solve?
Re:D-T fusion (Score:5, Funny)
In ITER, if not mitigated in some way, the electron stream could become so intense it would explosively vaporize holes through the wall of the reactor, like some kind of science fictional beam weapon.
Then they've clearly missed an opportunity. Rather than trying to sell it to governments as a fusion reactor, they should have been selling it to the US military as 'some kind of science fictional beam weapon'.
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In ITER, if not mitigated in some way, the electron stream could become so intense it would explosively vaporize holes through the wall of the reactor, like some kind of science fictional beam weapon.
Then they've clearly missed an opportunity. Rather than trying to sell it to governments as a fusion reactor, they should have been selling it to the US military as 'some kind of science fictional beam weapon'.
You win.
I wish I had mod points right now.
Article on fusion power (Score:2)
While on the subject it's worth mentioning the article [slashdot.org] from Ask Slashdot which nicely and detailed answers most of the questions you may have.
Actually, this is one of the best content articles I can remember on Slashdot... The graph in the middle is simultaneously funny and sad. :-/
Research translation (Score:2)
https://xkcd.com/678/ [xkcd.com]
Putting this in perspective (Score:2, Redundant)
From wikipedia:
The power production density of the core [of the Sun] overall is similar to the metabolic production density of a reptile.
...
At 19% of the solar radius, near the edge of the core, temperatures are about 10 million kelvin and fusion power density is 6.9 watts/m3
If even fusion inside the Sun does not produce any useful power output per volume, how are they going to get useful power outputs here on earth?
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core [wikipedia.org]
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You know how some cars use diesel, and some cars use gasoline?
Yeah.
But good question! I'm sure no one in the many, many, many years this has been studied by legions of engineers and scientists has ever thought to ask that question. I'll pass it on!
Joy... (Score:2)
Base don this I fully expect to see the first fully developed commercial fusion power plant come online by 2130 given the track record for fusion research.
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In 2130 it'll only be 20 years away!
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Base don this I fully expect to see the first fully developed commercial fusion power plant come online by 2130 given the track record for fusion research.
I think it's far more likely that, in 2030, Elon Musk will announce that Telsa have finally produced a usable electric car, powered by a Mr Fusion pack, at the same time as the government announces a new $100,000,000,000 project that will build a working fusion reactor by 2050.
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How is that going to happen when the research into industrial scale fusion will be delayed till after 2028?
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.
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Well around 100 years of research to get to steady-state plasma so another 100 years to develop a commercially viable power plant
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I made a mistake. I read 2130 as 2030 so you are probably close.
Thermal energy (Score:2)
So, the fusion reactor will generate 450MW energy bottom line as hot plasma.
I assume transforming that 450MW thermal energy into roughly 200MW electric energy is left as an brain excercise for the readers here?
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No, it won't happen. It is an experimental facility and the planners didn't see fit to put some high temperature components into it. Very similar to the first fission reactors, power will be removed at low temperature to keep the engineering effort under control.
It's about the fusion process first, the power generation is easy enough and will come once the physics of the reactor is sufficiently understood to turn it into an engineering and financing excercise.
hard to get excited (Score:2)
Forty years ago, I was a big proponent of fusion. My enthusiasm has petered out, sorry. I'm sure that science will be advanced by this project, but I've lost hope of seeing practical fusion power generation.
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I wonder where the 3D printers fans will be in 40 years when not a single of their revolutionary predictions will have come to pass?
<1980>
I wonder where the microprocessor fans will be in 40 years when not a single of their revolutionary predictions will have come to pass?
</1980>
Hey, I wonder whether you'll be back here in 40 years to admit you were wrong? I'd better bookmark this story.
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You know, you should have gone back to Watson's 1943 statement "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". It would have been a more entertaining point.
Ah yes, the Fulton's Folly Theorem. A discovery/technology that was disparaged but went on to be wildly successful/true held as proof that some other discovery/technology currently being disparaged will also go on to be wildly successful/true. I think I first ran into that reasoning watching an interview with Eric Von Danikan in the sevent
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I wonder why people keep comparing information processing with physical technologies as if there's some common ground?
You mean, microprocessors aren't 'physical technologies'? Damn, that's going to amuse my chip-designing friends.
And the 747 was, of course, a highly developed and mature technology for its era, so hardly likely to improve at the exponential rate seen in microprocessors.
But, hey, keep making completely spurious comparisons if it makes you feel good. I'll see you back here in 40 years.
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I wonder why people keep comparing information processing with physical technologies as if there's some common ground? Hey, how fast was a 747 in 1980? How fast was it in 1969? How fast is it now? How fast do you think it'll be in 40 years?
Precisely. I have a friend who used to work in aerospace. I asked why he didn't look for a job in commercial spaceflight? He said it's mildly interesting that space flight is getting cheaper and more practical, but in a substantial way, it's not getting much better. The efficiency of the Saturn V engines was up in the high nineties (I forget the exact number he quoted) -- 1960s technology -- and there needed to be a quantum leap to something else -- a significantly new type of fuel, or engine, or someth
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I wonder where the 3D printers fans will be in 40 years when not a single of their revolutionary predictions will have come to pass?
<1980>
I wonder where the microprocessor fans will be in 40 years when not a single of their revolutionary predictions will have come to pass?
</1980>
Hey, I wonder whether you'll be back here in 40 years to admit you were wrong? I'd better bookmark this story.
It's funny that you say that since fusion performance has been increasing faster than Moore's law [pppl.gov].
I'm glad you brought that up. To carry the simile further, Fusion hasn't produced a functioning transistor, yet. To show the scales in parallel isn't accurate -- the Fusion progress scale is way WAY to the left, before the point where multiple working transistors on a substrate succeeded in any practical way.
(Yeesh. Mix metaphors much?)
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Well, that would be exciting.
Bollocks (Score:2)
Excuse me? (Score:2)
FTFA: "Crucial to that is getting to the point, scheduled for 2027, when the first nuclear fuel would be injected into the reactor. "
So... the first *actual attempt at fusion* is some FOURTEEN YEARS AWAY, but the scientists are confident they're on track...
Yeah, I don't think I'll get excited quite yet., Check back in fourteen years and we'll see.
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Confining that kind of containment energy in an enclosed space has got to present problems unforeseen by any mathematical formulas. Its not like we have actually sent sp
Economically viable? (Score:3)
Great if you can build one, but can you build one that produces power that is cheaper than nuclear fission, solar, wind, etc?
Tell me again why we're not focused on thorium? (Score:3)
I mean, fusion power, when and if it ever works, will be beyond nifty, however, the world has quite a bit of inexpensive thorium, working plants have already been built in the USA and are currently being build in China and India. Moreover, thorium fission, since it won't continue unless actively driven by a fissile material, is inherently safer. Meltdowns are essentially impossible.
Could someone please tell me what I'm missing here? It's not that I'm against R&D or fusion power, per se. I'm just not sure what the point of emphasizing fusion power technology is compared to thorium.
Research is unpredictable (Score:2)
Research is by definition: learning about the unknown, so the time frame will be unknown too.
This belief that progress of fusion can be predicted, or that development time can be predicted, is just a religious dogma of the ruling bureaucratic class.
What about the engineering? (Score:2)
It takes more than science to make a power plant. It takes engineering too.
I heard that one must deal with temperature gradients as high as 1 million degrees C per meter to extract the power from a tokamak.
500 MW electric means 1000-1500 MW thermal. That's a lot of power. If it is radiated in a small volume, the power density is sky high.
Is anyone at ITER even working on that problem? There is no guarantee that it is solvable.
Perhaps build it first? (Score:2)
ITER is about as bad an example of big science as you can find. Long delayed, far greater costs. I realize they need to set long term goals but given that getting the plant to run at all in the first place is not 100% certain, maybe they should keep focusing on that for now?
Woah! (Score:2)
That's only fifteen years away, not twenty.
This is happening!
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It takes a special brand of incompetent to that obviously fuck up an article *headline.*
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A fusion reactor would be able to power itself... so I guess the headline is actually correct.
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A fusion reactor would be able to power itself...
Sure can. Here's a working example [wikipedia.org].
Question (Score:2)
ok, ITER isn't a production reactor. So it's not hooked to the grid, right? Not that pulses of 500 mw would be able to be utilized reasonably.
So -- what do they do with all that energy? Is there a huge bank of water cooled resistors nearby they dump the output into? Or what? There has to be a load of some kind, doesn't there?
Any ITER experts know?
Re:Why Didn't I think of that? (Score:5, Funny)
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"Fusion! The energy of the Future and always will be!"
Haha. That's good.
While I don't believe "It always will be", it is true that if past projections had been accurate, we would have had large-scale fusion power 30 years ago or more.
I'll believe THIS projection when they can achieve true break-even: when ELECTRICAL output exceeds all inputs (which includes all advance fuel acquisition and processing, etc.). So far nobody has come close to that. Until they do, this is still a pipe dream.
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We probably would have it already if not for (deserved or not) proliferation paranoia and NIMBYs.
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2028, just 20 (give or take 5) years away...still.
Mod parent down, please (Score:2)
There's no way to edit Slashdot comments. So the GP has no way of saying "Sorry... it's fixed!"
Perhaps that should be viewed as a limitation of /. and not of a being that can't travel backwards in time.
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If they ever implement a comment edit system, he will be complaining about all the posts lamenting the fact that there was no edit system.
Re:this is excellent news about generating power. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with the ITER approach is that the commercial reactor types based on it will cost too much to compete with traditional nuclear and coal. As It's based on a GIGANTIC no-financial-holds-barred approach.
The smaller approaches like LPP, General fusion, TriAlpha and whatever they're called nowdays that have shoestring to moderate budget will likely not only succeed to produce viable fusion energy sooner, they'll do so much cheaper too.
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The problem with the smaller approaches is that they have all failed to reach the break even point, and there is no indication that they even can reach break-even at their current scales.
It's a little like the old joke: "We'll lose 2 cents on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume!"
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"The potential to potential to solve humanities ever growing ever growing energy needs is certainly is certainly something we can all can all agree is important is important."
Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department, of your Natural Guard.
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You only just realized that?
Re:On track? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can scientific breakthroughs really be scheduled?
No, but engineering ones can be estimated pretty well. The basic principles are well understood. All that's left is building and fine-tuning. It's not like this is the first tokamak reactor we've built (see, e.g., JET & Tore Supra), and we're already planning DEMO to follow ITER as a sustained, continuous reactor. ITER is just a testbed for technologies needed to make a real reactor, like materials to resist damage from neutron emissions (in conjunction with work at IFMIF), plasma heating & vessel cooling, and a variety of other supporting technologies. ITER won't even have a way to generate power from the steam it produces. That's DEMO's job.
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So there is a clear path to actually producing energy with nuclear fusion? It has been theoretically possible for many decades, but the devil is usually in the details. I'm glad to hear that I will have my flying car soon!
Stop being supercilious. It's like you've never worked on a major project before.
This isn't just pie-in-the-sky ballparking. This is a major engineering project with goals and timelines. It's inevitable that something will slip due to an unforeseen complication, and IFMIF may not come up with a usable plasma facing material in time for DEMO, but there is a roadmap and concrete steps being taken in that direction. Fusion research deserves a little more respect than "flying car" slurs.
Yes, the road has be
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ITER would already be built and running if the US hadn't slashed funding in the 90's when congress went on a science slash fest. Europe now leads in high energy research because they've continued to fund projects like the LHC and ITER. It's very likely that if ITER is successful we'll be paying European experts to build our fusion power plants with European companies dominating the industry.
Re: On track? (Score:2)
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Richard F Post has a lot of interesting things to say on the subject, and was one of the scientists behind the magnetic mirror experiment at LLNL, that was mothballed before it ever started due to budget cuts..
A small clarification: Richard F. Post is an actual person: http://www.aip.org/history/acap/biographies/bio.jsp?postr [aip.org]
So, despite appearances, the above post is NOT "F. Post" troll. I'm actually a bit disappointed.
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Not only is Richard F. Post not fictional, but he has a famous (or semi-famous) daughter: the actress Markie Post of "Night Court" fame! [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)