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Power

ITER Nuclear Fusion Reactor Hit By COVID Delay, Rising Costs (euractiv.com) 56

Posted by BeauHD from the falling-behind-schedule dept.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) currently under construction in Cadarache, southern France, will see cost overruns and delays due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, its top official said on Friday. Euractiv reports: When the ITER project was launched in 2015, the schedule was to have the first plasma by the end of 2025 and full nuclear fusion by 2035, said Bernard Bigot, the director general of ITER. "We were on track until the end of 2019 but unfortunately, as you know, the world has been impacted by COVID-19," Bigot told journalists during an online press conference on Friday (17 September). As a result of the pandemic, factories were stopped and ships that took on average 45 days to deliver components from Korea took 90 days to arrive, he indicated. "While we were progressing on a monthly rate of nearly 0.7% on average during the last five years, last year in 2020 we were only able to achieve 0.35%," he explained. "So clearly, first plasma in 2025 is no longer technically achievable."

The delay means the costs of ITER will also likely go over budget, because of "running costs that cannot be eliminated," Bigot explained, saying he was preparing a full review for the ITER Council in November 2022. That said, Bigot expressed confidence that with the COVID-19 crisis receding, "we will be able to keep to the real target," which is to attain full fusion power by 2035. [...] The goal of the experimental plant is to demonstrate that fusion power can be generated sustainably, and safely, on a commercial scale. "Fusion provides clean, reliable energy without carbon emissions," said a statement from the 35 ITER partners.
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ITER Nuclear Fusion Reactor Hit By COVID Delay, Rising Costs More

ITER Nuclear Fusion Reactor Hit By COVID Delay, Rising Costs

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  • otherwise... (Score:4, Funny)

    by danda ( 11343 ) on Saturday September 18, 2021 @02:21AM (#61806915)

    It totally would have been on time and under budget. for sure. definitely covid's fault.

    • Covid is the dog-ate-my-homework universal excuse for everything. Anything that previously required at least a modicum of creativity to explain away is now covered with Covid.

      • Covid is the dog-ate-my-homework universal excuse for everything. Anything that previously required at least a modicum of creativity to explain away is now covered with Covid.

        The UK government has loads of problems like transport which have been completely unaffected by COVID (lorry drivers etc aren't subject to normal regulations, just occasional testing) but instead of admitting they are Brexit problems they say "COVID" every time. Almost think they are driving up our rates for winter so that they don't lose the excuse; it's the best explanation for their behaviour of getting rid of all protections and not asking for improved ventilation anywhere.

      • From summary

        >"As a result of the pandemic, factories were stopped"

        No, "As a result of the pandemic X, factories were stopped. "Replace the X with "reaction" or "regulations" or "fear" or whatnot.

    • Have you guys tried to do any kind of hardware development in the last 18 months? It's not just chip shortages, it's every damn thing. It's even hard to source injection molded pieces of plastic without encountering substantial delays. I can't even imagine how much exponentially harder it is to do bleeding-edge tech right now.

    • I wish I had mod points to give you.

  • Complicated (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday September 18, 2021 @02:40AM (#61806933)

    This is the world's toughest science and engineering problem, so yeah. A delay is fine. They have finished 70% of the way already. If there was no progress I'd be concerned .. slow progress is fine.

  • Yet more delays! (Score:3)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Saturday September 18, 2021 @03:16AM (#61806991)
    The summary is full of shite, the 2025 estimate was the like, revised revised estimate from a vast number of delays and cost overruns already. I'm all for fusion, but gigantic, multi failure, ever more delayed, ever more costly public projects are clearly not the best way to go about this. Especially when the officials in charge of the project repeatedly deny others estimates that they're going to face massive cost overruns and delays, only to then face those exact things. It's not exactly an inspiring show of competent, or even perhaps honest, leadership.

    For numerous counterexamples, NIF (national ignition facility) is quietly approaching ignition, breakeven, after operating for years. Yes it had cost overruns and delays, but it was actually built. It's been running and doing science. It looks like it will hit breakeven before ITER ever starts operations. And that's just one fusion experiment. Exploration of other designs is ongoing, many that actually work and are doing useful science like Germany's stellarator or South Korea's KSTAR. Heck there's several hopeful commercial ventures out there looking for funding that's currently being thrown at ITER; not to mention fascinating designs barely being explored such as the Lattice Confinement fusion, which could offer room temperature fusion.

    What I'm saying is, eye catchingly giant projects that don't do science for decades aren't a good road to practical fusion. Smaller, step by step experiments slowly building towards commercial deployment are far more effective; even if there's less potential for politicians to brag about it.

    • The summary is full of shite, the 2025 estimate was the like, revised revised estimate from a vast number of delays and cost overruns already. I'm all for fusion, but gigantic, multi failure, ever more delayed, ever more costly public projects are clearly not the best way to go about this. it.

      You have a better way?

      It's not as if the planet is at stake here or that government isn't spending trillions on military and other bullshit.

      Oh, wait...

    • I honestly don't care which one is first, I simply want to see an actual working fusion power plant before I die.

    • > For numerous counterexamples, NIF (national ignition facility) is quietly approaching ignition, breakeven, after operating for years.

      Failing to achieve almost all significant milestones is indeed "operating for years". It is also referred to as "profound failure", and "time to spend the money elsewhere".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      "For numerous counterexamples, NIF (national ignition facility) is quietly approaching ignition, breakeven, after operating for years."

      I guess if by "approaching" you mean the same was as Voyager is approaching another star.

      NIF is approaching "breakeven" in the special way they define it, where you count the total amount of energy released and divide by the total amount of *laser* energy you put in, ignoring that your lasers are less than 1% efficient.

      ITER is designed to produce about ten times as much ener

    • Actually NIF is very loudly (see the recent huge press splash) not approaching actual ignition at all. They have proven convincingly, by failure of the actual ignition campaign 10 years back, that the NIF is not capable of it. They have spent 10 years, after the ignition campaign failed, trying through heroic measures to get any fusion reaction at all started. The recent test is the very first one that produced any fusion reactions at all that were driven by fusion heating (al the others were from laser hea

  • Fans of fusion are fine with this. We accept that fusion is always 10 years away.

    • More like the traditional 20-50 years, not only 10.

      Even when complete Itar will just be a step on the way to actual proper fusion power plants not the end solution.

      • More like the traditional 20-50 years, not only 10.

        Even when complete Itar will just be a step on the way to actual proper fusion power plants not the end solution.

        I guess I'm a sort of fan of fusion. I definitely think it's a good idea to research it. I don't see what's the problem with a 50 or even 100 year timescale? York Minster Cathedral [yorkminster.org] took over 200 years to build and that didn't stop people. This may be difficult but if it works it will be worth it. N.B. I'm not saying we should stop research on fission, just saying that the results so far are distinctly disappointing and they have had plenty of time.

        If we are to reverse the damage done by fossil fuels so f

        • > If we are to reverse the damage done by fossil fuels so far we are going to need *massive* energy supplies.

          There is a large scale fusion powered energy source, the Sun itself. The solar panels don't need to on Earth: the solar mirror proposal, to beam microwave energy from orbitng solar mirrors to ground stations, is being studied by various NASA programs. It requires engineering and money, not new physics.

          • The physics of Nuclear fusion are well understood, all fusion energy production requires is "engineering and money, not new physics."

            • The sketch on the whiteboard of fusing hydrogen nuclei is well understood. The details are not. for example, the details of the high energy density plasma involved is very poorly understood. The publication about this from he US Department of Energy is is from 2010, but very little has changed in the field.

              https://science.osti.gov/-/med... [osti.gov]

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Strider- ( 39683 )

                Yes, but obtaining the energy densities required for practical fusion on earth (which are many orders of magnitude higher than the density of the sun, which is roughly that of a compost pile) is more of an Engineering challenge than it is a physics challenge.

        • York Minster Cathedral [yorkminster.org] took over 200 years to build and that didn't stop people.

          La Sagrada Familia [google.com] was started in 1882 [wikipedia.org] and still isn't finished.

    • Fusion has been achieved countless times. The problem is always ignition. There are even "cold fusion" experiments like SAFIRE, which herald the end times.

  • Turbines/Solar (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Barsteward ( 969998 )
    They could cover the country with turbines/solar etc many years before this this finally comes online.

  • That's the reason we can't have fusion power. It's been only 10 years away, but now it seems, it's gonna be another 10 years away.

    But we're hopeful that by then we have a new excuse.

    • The real reason is that nobody in power really wants fusion energy. They want energy that's expensive so they can keep selling it to us. With ITER, while the people working on it may not want the delays or to fail, they have budget constraints that severely slow their progress. Fusion funding should be on the order of trillions, but instead it's on the order of ~$1 billion per year or 1000X less than it should be.
  • That guy really have quite a unfortunate surname.

  • It's a sad thing, really.

    I think I must feel like an aging artist from the fifties, creating one of those lovely, but technically way-wrong books of rockets landing on other planets: very excited, but a little misty because the future I'm imagining will be out of my reach and experience.

    "Won't it be wonderful?"

    Of course, I'm also a pessimist about humans' ability to organize on a planetary scale to fix the climate, so maybe it's all moot. Maybe it was moot by the nineties, climate deniers or not, and we jus

  • I call bullshit. Just more excuses for making promises that cannot be kept. New science progresses according to its own schedule, not a bureaucratic project manager's artificial deadlines.

  • Funding for fusion research currently runs at 1/600,000th that of subsidising fossil fuels. You could increase fusion budgets by two or three orders of magnitude and it's still going to cause no measurable harm to anyone else.

  • As a layperson, it seems to me SPARC is a better bet anyway and likely online sooner. Iâ(TM)d lve to hear from any specialists on the matter https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc [mit.edu]
  • Especially in the socio-political climate of the 2020's. Just sayin'.
  • "When the ITER project was launched in When the ITER project was launched 2015"... - I recall driving by that place in 2010, seeing a big sign with ITER written on it and telling my gf about it. So, yeah, if your first sentence is already bullshit, I'm not going to waste my time on the rest of your article.

    • "When the ITER project was launched in When the ITER project was launched 2015"

      "So, yeah, if your first sentence is already bullshit, I'm not going to waste my time on the rest of your" post.

      Good work.

  • A "warning" to any countries involved, don't pull out of the ITER project or France will recall its ambassadors

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