World's Largest Fusion Project Is In Big Trouble, New Documents Reveal (scientificamerican.com) 157
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: It could be a new world record, although no one involved wants to talk about it. In the south of France, a collaboration among 35 countries has been birthing one of the largest and most ambitious scientific experiments ever conceived: the giant fusion power machine known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). But the only record ITER seems certain to set doesn't involve "burning" plasma at temperatures 10 times higher than that of the sun's core, keeping this "artificial star" ablaze and generating net energy for seconds at a time or any of fusion energy's other spectacular and myriad prerequisites. Instead ITER is on the verge of a record-setting disaster as accumulated schedule slips and budget overruns threaten to make it the most delayed -- and most cost-inflated -- science project in history.
The ITER project formally began in 2006, when its international partners agreed to fund an estimated [$6.3 billion], 10-year plan that would have seen ITER come online in 2016. The most recent official cost estimate stands at more than [$22 billion], with ITER nominally turning on scarcely two years from now. Documents recently obtained via a lawsuit, however, imply that these figures are woefully outdated: ITER is not just facing several years' worth of additional delays but also a growing internal recognition that the project's remaining technical challenges are poised to send budgets spiraling even further out of control and successful operation ever further into the future.
The documents, drafted a year ago for a private meeting of the ITER Council, ITER's governing body, show that at the time, the project was bracing for a three-year delay -- a doubling of internal estimates prepared just six months earlier. And in the year since those documents were written, the already grim news out of ITER has unfortunately only gotten worse. Yet no one within the ITER Organization has been able to provide estimates of the additional delays, much less the extra expenses expected to result from them. Nor has anyone at the U.S. Department of Energy, which is in charge of the nation's contributions to ITER, been able to do so. When contacted for this story, DOE officials did not respond to any questions by the time of publication.
The ITER project formally began in 2006, when its international partners agreed to fund an estimated [$6.3 billion], 10-year plan that would have seen ITER come online in 2016. The most recent official cost estimate stands at more than [$22 billion], with ITER nominally turning on scarcely two years from now. Documents recently obtained via a lawsuit, however, imply that these figures are woefully outdated: ITER is not just facing several years' worth of additional delays but also a growing internal recognition that the project's remaining technical challenges are poised to send budgets spiraling even further out of control and successful operation ever further into the future.
The documents, drafted a year ago for a private meeting of the ITER Council, ITER's governing body, show that at the time, the project was bracing for a three-year delay -- a doubling of internal estimates prepared just six months earlier. And in the year since those documents were written, the already grim news out of ITER has unfortunately only gotten worse. Yet no one within the ITER Organization has been able to provide estimates of the additional delays, much less the extra expenses expected to result from them. Nor has anyone at the U.S. Department of Energy, which is in charge of the nation's contributions to ITER, been able to do so. When contacted for this story, DOE officials did not respond to any questions by the time of publication.
Never finishing your government project (Score:2, Insightful)
is a good way to ensure a decent salary for many years to come.
And when it is about to be completed, you just start running through the building, shouting 'Upgrade! Upgrade!'.
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Why not finish it and get a new contract? Otherwise you can be cancelled. The govt. has cancelled big project before such as Superconducting Supercollider and VentureStar. Heck they even cancelled the DC-X after one lousy setback (luckily Masten Aerospace/SpaceX/Blue Origin etc. continued its legacy).
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You *might* get a new contract but that would take years to negotiate...so sometimes incentives are against actual interests.
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By finishing the contract they lose the sunk cost leverage of the money spent without return.
Ha. Every time I hear about "sunk cost" I think about this line from Eleanor (Kristen Bell) in The Good Place [wikipedia.org], episode Mondays, Am I Right? [fandom.com] (s4e11):
Eleanor: In my defense, I didn't realize he was my boyfriend's twin until halfway into hooking up with him, and at that point, you know, it's a sunk cost.
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By finishing the contract they lose the sunk cost leverage of the money spent without return.
You *might* get a new contract but that would take years to negotiate...so sometimes incentives are against actual interests.
ITER and other vapor projects will take as much money as is sent to them up to the point that they either break their funding sugar daddies, or reason sets in.
Fission based power, which has been around over 70 years now, chugs merrily along after a few years of basic development, while we celebrate the Qtot of .01 for an extremely small length of time as some sort of new dawn of humanity. Cheap, incredibly safe and essentially limitless power, freeing humanity from it's shackles. Al we have to to is pic
Re:Never finishing your government project (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. Also, these are research projects. Progress being made is not the same as the thing getting finished. In research projects, progress is made all the time and it is easy to evaluate the progress using outside experts as there is a stream of publications.
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Re:Never finishing your government project (Score:4, Interesting)
backslashdot stated:
The govt. has cancelled big project before such as Superconducting Supercollider and VentureStar. Heck they even cancelled the DC-X after one lousy setback (luckily Masten Aerospace/SpaceX/Blue Origin etc. continued its legacy).
Both of those were USA ventures, where laying off staff is simple and inexpensive. ITER, by contrast, is headquartered in France, whose employment laws require two years of the full salaries and benefits of laid-off personnel to be funded - in advance - at their termination. Considering ITER's gigantic, well-paid staff, shutting it down would cost several billion euros in severance costs alone. And that's in addition to the price tag for mothballing the existing physical plant, paying off the cancellation fees for terminating all the vendor contracts without just cause, and all the other financial obligations that unwinding an international consortium's mega-project entail under EU regulations.
To put it another way: you're comparing apples with pomegranetes ...
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Why not finish it and get a new contract? Otherwise you can be cancelled. The govt. has cancelled big project before such as Superconducting Supercollider and VentureStar. Heck they even cancelled the DC-X after one lousy setback (luckily Masten Aerospace/SpaceX/Blue Origin etc. continued its legacy).
Canceling a project doesn't necessarily kill it. Dick Cheney, way back when he was Bush the Elder's Secretary of Defense, cancelled the MV-22 Osprey. The Marine Corps went around him and bent arms in Congress, to the point where the Congress simply reinstated it and told Cheney "Don't bother canceling this, we'll just put it back". A determined bureaucracy knows how to get what it wants.
Re: Never finishing your government project (Score:2)
Well, at least we did kill the B-1A bomber. Oh, wait ...
Re:Never finishing your government project (Score:4, Insightful)
Generally not true for applied research projects, at least not in Europe. CERN is a good example. And sometimes, something else may even fall out that is worthwhile. In the case of CERN that was the WWW and that alone has probably paid for CERN a few 1000 times over in the greater scheme of things.
Fundamental not Applied (Score:5, Informative)
Generally not true for applied research projects, at least not in Europe. CERN is a good example.
CERN is not a good example of applied research since it primarily does fundamental research. The web was not a research project at CERN but merely someone in the CN division there being tasked to find a way for physicists working in large international collaborations to be able to effectively communicate and share documents and ideas with each other.
It was a brilliantly creative solution to a problem that those of us working as physicists at CERN at the time were facing that turned out to be incredibly useful for just about everything else as well. It's an example of a spin-off technology from fundamental physics research, not applied research.
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Re:Fundamental not Applied (Score:4, Informative)
it would just have a communications protocol designed by someone who knew how to make a communications protocol instead of a physicist trying to skip out on paying a software license.
You are confused. Tim Berners-Lee is not a physicist, never was a physicist. Yes, he has a BA in physics, but it's not at all uncommon for software developers to have physics or math degrees even today, and in the 1970s CS degrees weren't terribly common. Oxford, where TBL studied, didn't offer CS courses, per se, until 1985 (though they did have a computing lab for students studying mathematics and physics to use). After graduating, TBL worked as a software developer. He never did physics work. And his first job after university was working for Plessey, a telecommunications company, and he worked for another company on RPC protocols.
Perhaps TBL could have designed a better protocol but saying that he didn't know what he was doing because he was a physicist is just wrong. He was a software engineer specializing (to some degree) in communications, who happened to have studied physics in college rather than mathematics, which would have been the other option at that time.
All that said, I'd be interested to hear what you think he should have done differently when designing HTTP. Please, lay some communications protocol wisdom on us.
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I'm unaware of everything CERN does, however they seem mainly to be in the business of applying theory to actual physical situations. That is, a theory tells them for what they should look and what they should expect to see. Designing the experiment to get at those issues is an exercise in applied research. Just doing physics does not make it fundamental.
Are you feeling all right? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is fusion. It's a research project. 22 billion would be peanuts. We spend over 40 times that defending our country from nobody. And that's just our budget that's not all the other countries that are involved in this.
People seem to have forgotten what basic research is. People seem to have forgotten that you have to do research that doesn't pay off immediately in order to get long-term benefits. The phrases planting a tree whose shade you will never sit under.
Our great-grandparents planted those trees for us. We have been benefiting massively from trillions of dollars in basic research that is paid off our entire lives. And then instead of planting that tree we pulled the ladder up behind us and slashed funding. And all we got out of it was some trickle-down tax cuts that never trickled down.
This hostility towards government projects that don't immediately pay off for you personally is something that was instilled in us. It's not an accident that we have a knee jerk reaction to the basic research we used to happily fund and take for granted that are great grandchildren would be benefiting from. People at the top got tired of paying for people they were never going to meet to have better lives, and we let them sell us on that.
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Because that was a very mean spirited comment that doesn't belong on a science and technology forum like this.
This is fusion. It's a research project. 22 billion would be peanuts. We spend over 40 times that defending our country from nobody. And that's just our budget that's not all the other countries that are involved in this.
People seem to have forgotten what basic research is. People seem to have forgotten that you have to do research that doesn't pay off immediately in order to get long-term benefits. The phrases planting a tree whose shade you will never sit under.
No, that's just what fark tells you because that's exactly what you want to hear. Apparently you're not familiar with the incredible amount of time and money being spent on quantum computing, which is almost exclusively being done by the private sector. Or, you know, the 30 years worth of R&D that ultimately went towards the COVID shot, also done by the private sector by the way, namely by pharma companies that you love to hate, and had it not been for that it would still not have a practical applicatio
Re:Are you feeling all right? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Are you feeling all right? (Score:2)
If that was even remotely true, you'd be dead already.
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mRNAs LNP have been demonstrated to get into all cells of the body including heart and brain cells causing cell death and inflammation
Cite?
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>Doesn't matter whether you're right or I'm right, this comment is complete bullshit.
No it's not. Research to find out the most likely looking candidate for what you are looking for is NOT viable is just as valuable as research finding that it is viable.
Not only are many new things discovered in the search for viability, but new understandings of limitations can be uncovered as well.
All you have done is prove that you have no understanding of science, the scientific method, or the subject at large. Meani
Re:Are you feeling all right? (Score:5, Interesting)
People seem to have forgotten what basic research is. People seem to have forgotten that you have to do research that doesn't pay off immediately in order to get long-term benefits. The phrases planting a tree whose shade you will never sit under.
Our great-grandparents planted those trees for us. We have been benefiting massively from trillions of dollars in basic research that is paid off our entire lives. And then instead of planting that tree we pulled the ladder up behind us and slashed funding. And all we got out of it was some trickle-down tax cuts that never trickled down.
The story you weave is entirely fictional.
Basic research funding has ballooned since the 50s, with a continual increase in federal funding, and a sharp increase in private funding since the 80s [nsf.gov].
Research funding overall has vastly increased and largely due to industry investment [aaas.org].
Just in our present topic of fusion there are dozens of private companies investing billions to make it viable [energystartups.org].
Because that was a very mean spirited comment that doesn't belong on a science and technology forum like this.
It was an extremely mild if critical comment. To suggest it shouldn't even be permitted in the discussion I can only assume it trampled on sacred tenets you hold dear. But I think the employees themselves and most people on slashdot can shrug it off just fine.
Re:Are you feeling all right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of that is applied research. That's how government managers get bullet points, they've succumbed to MBA-itis. It is horrid and has set us back years. If all you are doing is applied research, eventually you are just re-arranging deck chairs. If you subtract the large grants for new physics whizzies (which is again applied), the picture looks quite different.
And few companies are into doing fundamental research, they have shareholders and must turn things into profit centers. So their predilection, if not marching orders, is to do practical research resulting in a widget that one of their MBAs can understand and claim it has his/her own.
Opportunity Cost, Economic Viability (Score:4, Insightful)
This is fusion. It's a research project. 22 billion would be peanuts.
Have you ever looked at the size of research budgets? As someone who does fundamental physics research, I have to say that even someone like me is beginning to question the costs and overruns at ITER. To put the cost in context the LHC at CERN cost around $4.5 billion.
When evaluating to cost of a project like ITER you have to factor in the opportunity cost. How much other research is not being done because $22 billion in research funding is going to ITER given that you could construct 5 LHC-like projects for the same cost? Is the outcome of ITER going to be better than all the discoveries we may miss out on because all the money is going into ITER? I do not have an answer for that but it is a question that should be asked and we had to answer that same question to granting agencies when justifying funding for the LHC.
ITER is also applied not fundamental research: the goal is to apply knowledge of plasma physics to build a fusion reactor. This raises the additional question of whether this approach is feasible. If the resulting fusion reactor tech they develop costs $100+ billion to construct a commercial reactor is that something which is economically viable? That's not a question you ask when doing fundamental research because you have no idea what you might find and even when you find it applications are decades away. However, this is a question you need to ask of ITER whose goal is to make a viable fusion reactor.
Lose money at 100 billion per power reactor (Score:2)
and make it up with financing fees along with the service department.
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> If the resulting fusion reactor tech they develop costs $100+ billion to
> construct a commercial reactor is that something which is economically viable?
It is not. Even fission can't compete these days, and it already works and is much less expensive than a tokamak of similar power.
The power companies have been saying this since the start of the fusion program. Way back in the 1950s someone pointed out that the stellarator seemed like a very complex machine and might not be usable for power generatio
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Oh shut up.
There's a difference between funding a basic research lab with open ended mandates, and funding A PROJECT with A GOAL.
We're not talking about a research project here that's not hitting it's result goals. We're taking about a lab that's massively over running costs and time line JUST GETTING BUILT.
It's fundamental engineering questions of construction that weren't asked, calculations that weren't done, contractors that were vetted without being qualified.
It's an incompetent administrator and orga
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Maybe the final fusion reactors will not be purely Tokamak designs, maybe their Stellarator cousins will prove to be more suited. But most of the principles are first developed for tokamak designs and tested there.
And as others have pointed out: ITER is not a business. It's a research project. One of the base elements of research is that you don't know yet what the result will be, hence you have
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The first, and best, thermonuclear reactor design is gravitational confinement. Proven success over the last 10 billion years or so.
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This only happens with government projects? All private industry projects are, of course, successful...
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This is more of "Wow we are so excited about this! It will save the world! And we can do it in 10 years for 10 Billion Max! Think about the consequences! Nirvana!!"
Never underestimate the problem you are trying to solve. Especially if you are obviously dealing with a very hard problem pushing the frontiers of science and engineering.
Re:Never finishing your government project (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual problem is that fusion is actually hard and money can't solve it. We don't have the materials technology.
Which is why ITER has two components. The test reactor in Europe and materials research center in Japan. We haven't been able to invent new materials to survive the insane temperatures this thing has to run on because we don't have Sun's gravity well to compress everything, so it's really late because multiple improvisations to get something done had to be made.
Reality is, fusion on planet's surface "remains 50 years away", as was the case for last 70 or so years. And there are no guarantees we can find a way to crack this problem. Right now, we don't know how.
The whole "but money can fix everything" as a concept doesn't actually work in practice when you need something that hasn't been invented yet. You might be able to invent a path to that thing by throwing lots of money at it, which is what we've been doing for a long time. Because if we manage to crack the "fusion on planet's surface" problem, we have almost infinite energy available. So it's very much worth it to try.
But it doesn't mean you can go screaming that "we gave you the money and it didn't work". This isn't a game of Civilization, where you start a research and you know where it will lead. This is real life, where most research leads to nowhere.
Re: Never finishing your government project (Score:4, Interesting)
We absolutely do have the materials⦠just not for tierâ(TM)s design. Itâ(TM)s not the temperatures that are the problem - thatâ(TM)s easy to solve with magnetic confinement in a near vacuum, which you need anyway for fusion to be possible. The problem is the neutron flux. ITER uses a solid layer to absorb neutrons and use them to produce the heat that in a non research reactor would go towards electricity, along with producing tritium to fuel the reactor. That solid blanket degrades over time and becomes highly radioactive. It then needs to somehow be removed from inside a bunch of immovable magnets that fully surround it, and replaced with a fresh one. Finding the materials to make that possible is a non-starter. There is one area of the reactor where heat is a problem which is the diverter, where the plasma is deliberately brought into contact with the reactor wall to be able to siphon off waste products and add fuel. The temperatures though are absolutely manageable.
Thereâ(TM)s another reactor being built right now (SPARC) which is imo much more likely to succeed. They have figured out how to make the magnetic coils demountable, so the reactor vacuum vessel can be removed and replaced easily. They have a smaller reactor, making the diverter design harder due to more concentrated heat, but even there it seems like heat is manageable. In their eventual commercial reactor (ARC), they will use a liquid FLiBe blanket, which will be trivially replaced by continuing to pump it around.
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Producing nuclear waste is not going to help the technology become commercially viable. Given we are 70+ years into trying to figure out what to do with nuclear waste and still haven't got a good solution, it's not looking hopeful for a good option to be found.
Given we have a climate emergency, while I wouldn't say defund this kind of thing, we can't rely on it as a solution. Using the fusion reactor we already have, i.e. the sun, is the only solution that involves fusion.
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Producing nuclear waste is not going to help the technology become commercially viable.
The whole point of ITER is gathering scientific data related to burning plasmas to benefit other fusion projects.
Given we are 70+ years into trying to figure out what to do with nuclear waste and still haven't got a good solution, it's not looking hopeful for a good option to be found.
Comparing nuclear waste from fusion with fission is bonkers.
Re: Never finishing your government project (Score:2)
While fusion produces nuclear waste, the comparison with waste from fission is laughable. The life time of the isotopes produced is far far shorter (weâ(TM)re talking about storing the thing for decades, not millennia), and the volume of waste produced is far far smaller. Thereâ(TM)s no proliferation risk with it. Dealing with the waste from a fission plant would effectively be a solved problem (we know how to stir nuclear waste for the periods needed for fusion, and in the volumes needed) unli
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Producing nuclear waste is not going to help the technology become commercially viable
Here ye Hear ye. Once again the great anti nuclear Troll AmiMoJo chimes in on a subject they know nothing about to spread their FUD. Enlighten Oh great Troll on what you know about the fusion process. We greatly await your guidance.
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>Given we are 70+ years into trying to figure out what to do with nuclear waste and still haven't got a good solution, it's not looking hopeful for a good option to be found.
We have a fucking solution, and have had it since reactors were first thought up. We have existing reactor designs that can burn "spent" fuel all the way down the decay chain... but there are morons screaming "But we could make bomb number 1899 with those designs, CLEARLY that's too much, we only need 1898 bombs!!!oneONE" as if 1:
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It's been 10 years away for the past 60 years.
"Money can't solve it" (Score:2)
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ELI5 for people who really don't understand:
Money is prerequisite for trying to make it work. It doesn't guarantee it working. Without money, you can't even try. With money, you can try but there are no guarantees you'll be successful.
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e.g. reddit
https://www.vice.com/en/articl... [vice.com]
It is not much of an issue (Score:3)
The thing is that it is the wrong wrong to evaluate all fusion projects individually for economic aspects. Nobody knows how to do fusion, both on the tech side and on the organizational side of finding out. It is like that in all research: 10, 100, or even 1000 people, projects or approaches fail and the one that eventually works makes it all worthwhile.
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that's factually wrong. all of those experiments have shown greated output than input. the only issue is the multiplication factor to render the thing commercially viable, which hasn't been attained yet
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Actually, this is *exactly* testing nuclear weapons physically, except you test one differential volume of the bomb instead of the whole thing, because if you get it right, then you can extend your model using the cell results. :)
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It's easy. Set up your gravitationally-confined fusion reactor, and then use silicon-based collectors to convert emitted electromagnetic radiation into electricity.
They say... (Score:4, Funny)
They say fusion is always 10 years away so three doesn't sound too bad :D
They lie. (Score:2)
That is a lie.
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Yes, in the 70 or so years of "fusion power development" the number of years that we'll have to wait has been reduced from 30 to 10. That's excellent news!
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> Yes, in the 70 or so years of "fusion power development
85 as of this year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_Inhibitor
Thank God that America has a number of them (Score:2)
Helion is working on last prototype reactor that if things go well, will produce electricity next year. And if so, they will have production in 2027.
Likewise, Zap Energy is moving right along.
Add in Terrapower, which will enable US to complete the nuclear fuel cycle and we will be able to clean up nearly all of the 'spent fuel' issue.
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None of these are close to breaking even reaction-wise, nevermind "producing electricity".
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> None of these are close to breaking even reaction-wise, nevermind "producing electricity".
Depends on your definition of close, of course.
If by "close" you mean "whatever we say it will be with no evidence whatsoever", then it's totally close!
But if by "close" you mean "the actual demonstrated triple product" then come on, it's only six orders of magnitude to go!
Not surprised (Score:3)
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Fission reactors are not "inefficient", quite the contrary. They convert efficiently nearly 100% of the nuclear fission energy into heat, which is their purpose. The energy that is lost is that carried by the neutrinos, which is rather small, OTOH about 5% of all.
Your first problem is the low efficiency of the electricity generation, which is due to the lack of suitable materials to build reactors that can sustain high temperatures similar to the gas turbines.
Your second problem is the inefficient usage of
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> They convert efficiently nearly 100% of the nuclear fission energy into heat, which is their purpose.
Yeah, you need to read a book. Or google "burnup fraction" anyway. Only about 5% of the fuel is actually used up before the pull it out of the reactor.
We don't measure efficiency of a car by saying "well 100% of the fuel turned into heat", we measure it by how much of that fuel turned into miles, you know, "miles per gallon".
And we don't measure nuclear efficiency by considering only those atoms that un
ITER doesn't matter (Score:3)
ITER is based on obsolete assumptions. MIT will produce better confinement with SPARC in about a 1/10th the size, and there is a real possibility that SPARC will be running before ITER. The magnet technology of SPARC didn't exist at the time ITER was proposed.
ITER should be shut down and the resources directed to fusion research that has a chance of being relevant. Either building on the progress made with inertial confinement or a new design toroid using current magnet technology.
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The real value in ITER will be that it got things going. If it one day leads to commercial fusion, even based upon a completely different approach, it will be well worth the investment.
It's sick (Score:2, Informative)
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> There didn't and doesn't have to be a "careers" page for that website
https://www.iter.org/jobs
> Without having looked, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory probably donesn't have a "careers" page either
https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers
You are both lazy *and* dumb.
Well, glad your priorities are straight (Score:2, Insightful)
War would change our lifes forever, too (Score:2)
â¦and it requires less education and less of an attention span than the average person whoâs left on slashdot has.
And maybe not even UTF-8 (Score:2)
no comment
Re: Well, glad your priorities are straight (Score:2)
Never happened before. (Score:3)
We were warned. (Score:2, Interesting)
President Dwight Eisenhower delivered a farewell address to the American people on January 17, 1961. In the address, which lasted less than 10 minutes and whose transcript you can read here [archives.gov], The man who lead the military through WWII in Europe, and through much of the early Cold War, warned the American people that the world had changed and that they needed to be alert to a whole new set of dangers.
Over the past 60+ year, many people (mostly politically left-leaning) have quoted the portion of the speech wh
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The problem is is that they're NOT huge amounts of money. Fusion, worldwide, has received in total over the past 70 years about the same that fossil fuels receives in subsidies every 3 minutes (going by IMF estimates). That's not huge, not compared to the difficulty of the venture, which you have to admit is just a teeny bit more complex than getting a coal mine or a coal power station to work. If OLD, SIMPLE technology takes $11 million every minute in order to function, then anything less than that can be
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> Fusion, worldwide, has received in total over the past 70 years about the same
> that fossil fuels receives in subsidies every 3 minutes
Hmmm. There are 24 x 365 x 60 minutes in a year, or 525,600 minutes. ITER alone is 22 billion. So that would imply 525600 / 3 * 22 billion = 3,854,400 billion dollars a year in subsidies? Three point eight quintillion dollars a year?
How did that get through your brain without any tingling feeling?
A quick google search puts it at 1 trillion a year worldwide:
https://ww
Wise man once said (Score:2)
“A project that glows twice as bright costs twice as much.”
Sure, we are way over the “twice as much” cost, but we are talking about fusion here, The work is difficult, but the rewards are extreme and world changing. Still the same, we cannot let government style waste creep into the project
Not that bad. (Score:2)
Not surprised. (Score:2)
This is what happens when you fund everything on a shoestring. Fusion has a very tiny budget, compared to the scale of the endeavor. It's actually tiny compared to almost anything. The total WORLDWIDE funding for fusion over the course of the last 70 years is equal to around three minutes of present-day subsidy for fossil fuels. That's how insignificant fusion funding is.
This matters. When things are budgeted that tight, costs WILL go up. That's just the nature of the beast for any project. You have to spen
How could this possibly have happened? (Score:2)
0. NASA is hardly involved. Without that, progress is both rapid and assured, right? Ordinarily NASA is like a blowtorch to a quantum computer any more. The Apollo effect is long expired.
1. It's the future of our planet, saving us from climate change resulting in flooding the coastal cities, making apocalyptic movies, carbon offsets, and the lamentations of the women obsolete. That can't be, the cause is just, and cannot be questioned.
2. Well, this is the real reason. If it's Science, then it is the process
So...just like the James Webb telescope (Score:2)
Where is the problem? (Score:2)
This is an experiment. It may work or it may fail, either way invaluable things will be learnt.
The bean counters are delusional if they think they can buy cold fusion with a known amount of money, it's never been done before. It's worth trying because the benefits are enormous.
$4B from US (Score:2)
The US share of this boondoggle is currently estimated to be about $4 billion. Of course, that doesn't count the interest on the sovereign debt that the US will incur to obtain that $4B; with interest the cost will be about $8B.
Is that all? (Score:3)
Let's look at the costs to construct a standard (fission) power station:
"The [Sizewell C nuclear power station] [theguardian.com] project had been expected to cost £20bn and take 10-12 years to build. Stephen Thomas, a professor at Greenwich Business School, said the average forecast put the cost at £35bn over 15 years, or £2.3bn a year."
"The revised operating date for the site [of the Hinkley Point nuclear power station] [bbc.co.uk] in Somerset is now June 2027 and total costs are estimated to be in the range of £25bn to £26bn."
Now granted these are for 'production' power stations but, in theory at least, fission is a mature technology. Spending a roughly equivalent sum on an experimental reactor which was envisioned to test multiple aspects of fusion technology doesn't strike me as money wasted. While I might take issue with the simple torus design, and while I question the continued reliance on 'old' magnetic technologies it's certain that changing either of these after project commencement would have significantly added to the cost whilst not really adding to the scientific outcomes. <- assuming it gets finished and functions as intended, that is...
The suggestion of a 'cover-up' is troubling though - but I wonder how much of this is FUD being spread by those who'd rather sling mud, than concede that the project itself is not actually a 'terrible' idea.
ITER was always just pork. (Score:2)
Re:It isn't a bug (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude you're the liar. It was NEVER sold as being able to be connected to the grid, from the beginning it was to prove that the tokamak model can sustainably produce excess power. The follow-on to ITER, called DEMO is the project intended to be capable of being hooked up to the grid. Here's an article from 2006: https://ww2.aip.org/fyi/2006/u... [aip.org]
Quote: ITER's purpose is "to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion in a facility that for the first time will be able to produce a sustained, burning plasma, much like that needed for a full-scale fusion power plant.”
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There were some early plans to generate a bit of power just to say the did, but the amount from ITER would be too small to be interesting. Huge as it is its a scaled down version of a production reactor (D
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Which year did MIT grant you your PhD in Plasma physics?
Re:It isn't a bug (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, in Europe it was never sold as anything but a research reactor. I have no idea who claimed this was aimed at producing power, but I have never heard that claim for ITER itself in the European media, and same for the X7. Hence the people responsible for that lie may not even be part of the project. I suspect some political interests and/or some of the now so common abysmally bad "news" reporting.
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ITER – the world’s largest nuclear fusion project – reached a construction milestone last week as the final components of the reactor arrived on the build site in southeastern France. The $25 billion endeavor, which aims to produce sustainable fusion energy on a commercial scale, is financed by seven of the world’s largest energy powerhouses: the European Union, United Kingdom China, India, Russia, Japan, South Korea and the United States.
From CBS News [cbsnews.com]
After four and a half years of assembly, in December of 2025, ITER scientists and engineers hope to launch "First Plasma" — the initial event demonstrating the machine's functionality. If all goes according to plan, the plant at ITER will produce about 500 megawatts of thermal power. The team says that if operated continuously and connected to the electric grid, ITER would be able to generate about 200 megawatts of electric power, enough for about 200,000 homes.
And from ITER [iter.org] itself.
The international experiment ITER, which starts operating in 2020, will be the first device to produce a net surplus of fusion power, namely 500 megawatts from a 50 megawatt input.
I'm sure there were many who as you say knew ITER would make no power but the ITER PR team certainly wasn't among them. They implied ITER would make power just about every time they could. If journalists were confused on this point, they made no attempt to correct the impression. Research into other energy sources (one that might actually work) were redirected into this fantasy. Oh, and BTW, the type of fusion ITER does makes plenty of radiation and radioact
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Re:It isn't a bug (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It isn't a bug (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody ever said ITER would not make power. The claim was ITER would make make power continuously and would make it commercially available and that is just bullshit.
Forbes and CBS are not directly lying either. You just need to know how to read these. Forbes just says that the whole project aims to eventually produce energy commercially, not that the ITER installation itself will do it. That is accurate. I would call it sloppy reporting or a lie by misdirection. CBS says that if ITER _were_ actually fitted with what it takes for commercial energy generation (it is not) and could be operated continuously (it cannot), then it hypothetically could supply 200MW. Again, very sloppy reporting or lying by misdirection. The ITER quote just refers to the hoped for thermal output in time-limited experiments.
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I did call two of them a "lie by misdirection". Apparently even my brief comment was already too complex for you to read...
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You cherry-picked the reports of some misinformed journalists. The vast majority of reports correctly and clear stated that it wasn't going to be a power plant.
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> some misinformed journalists
They were being informed directly by the ITER team.
Don't blame journalists for reporting what they're being told by the people involved. That's literally their job.
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ITER never said it would be hooked up to the grid, or that it would produce electricity. They said it will produce energy.
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This is OK except for the part when they said it would someday make power and sell it. That part was an extremely unethical lie.
While it was always intended to generate excess (more-than-went-in) power — that is the point of the experiment — you’ll need to back up, with some evidence, your claim that they said they would sell it. I’ve been involved in fusion research for 26 years and have never heard that. The next stage machine was always intended to be the one to connect to the electrical grid.
Re: It isn't a bug (Score:2)
Even less the ability to produce $30B of electric to break even
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ITER's problem isn't government, it is physics. The only reasonable way to do fusion energy is as it is currently done - inside a large reactor that naturally produces the conditions for a self-sustaining reaction that will last billions of years.
All "earth-based" fusion projects are fiction - there is not ONE theoretically reasonable construction that doesn't contain enormous contradicting requirements, or that provides a natural way to capture and extract the produced energy and allows easy, self-correcti
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Re:Government projects only have one issue. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, all parts of my statement are true. The basic, most fundamental difference between a fission reactor and a fusion reactor of any "plasma confinement" design is that in the first kind, all parts work for you.
Not only is the fuel is pretty happy to sit there in one place and generate energy for you, moreover, the moderator that you use to control the rate of reaction is also cooperating, by cooling the fuel and transporting the energy to the turbine.
It is exactly the opposite in a fusion reactor - there everything works against you. The fuel is hot, unstable plasma that wants to get away and not produce energy, and your moderation method is complex, hard to measure and useless for energy transport. And I've not even begin to discuss the real-life difficulties of creating a working plasma confinement device, not to mention one that can produce more energy that it uses.
Fusion, except the one that happens in stars, is and will remain useless for many, many years to come, most likely forever.
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> There is little reason to believe that the next cycle in the Wendelstein 7-X experimental
> Stellarator won't work as predicted given the history
Wut?
Literally every single generation of stellarator has underperformed predictions since the Stellarator B in the 1950s.
Given the *actual* history, there is considerable reason to believe the next cycle won't work as predicted.
And stellarators of the current generation are terrible, terrible machines for power production. They are dramatically larger and mo
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You mean the "theory" from a bunch of retirees that has led to precisely nothing other than some YouTube videos?
Yeah, let me get right on that.