Green Light For ITER Fusion Project 359
brian0918 writes, "A seven-member international consortium has signed a formal agreement to build the $12.8 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). From the article: 'Representatives from China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States signed the pact, sealing a decade of negotiations. The project aims to research a clean and limitless alternative to dwindling fossil fuel reserves, although nuclear fusion remains an unproven technology.' ITER will be built 'in Cadarache, southern France, over the course of a decade, starting in 2008.'" If ITER is successful, a commercial reactor could be built by 2040. Funny, I seem to remember fusion researchers from Livermore in the 70s say that commercial power was 20 years away...
My submission (additional links) (Score:4, Informative)
The Telegraph [telegraph.co.uk] and several [sciam.com] other [reuters.co.uk] news outlets [guardian.co.uk] are reporting on the international deal to build the world's most advanced nuclear fusion reactor that was signed in today. Representatives of the EU, the US, Japan, India, Russia, South Korea and China signed the ITER [wikipedia.org] (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) agreement in Paris, finalising the project which aims to develop nuclear fusion as a viable energy source to fossil fuels. According to the ITER consortium, fusion power offers the potential of "environmentally benign, widely applicable and essentially inexhaustible" electricity, properties that they believe will be needed as world energy demands increase while simultaneously greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced,justifying the expensive research project.
Re:just like (Score:3, Informative)
Or to put it in a context for this site, the Y2K bug. We flipped from 19xx to 20xx without much of a problem because a lot of testing and code corrections were done before January 1 hit. You can't write that off either.
Re:just like (Score:2, Informative)
[Some scientists] estimate that large predatory fish biomass today is only about 10% of pre-industrial levels. source [nature.com]
2002, 10% left - that's close enough for me
Electrostatic confinement (Score:5, Informative)
The magnetic field has no divergence (there are no magnetic monopoles) so it is extremely difficult to confine anything -- you can only slow down the leakage. That comes with some problems -- for example, it's very hard to get anything into or out of a magnetic bottle (as in a Tokamak) unless it is electrically neutral. Accelerating and heating the plasma are hard because the energy sources you can use (manipulation of the magnetic field itself, either at radiofrequency (RF heating) or near DC (betatron heating), themselves destabilize the confinement.
D3D used the innovation of firing neutral atoms in through the magnetic bottle, which provides material and heat into the plasma (the atoms generally ionize once they get in -- and then they're trapped like the rest of the plasma). The problem there is that we have no technology to accelerate neutral particles -- so they had these little tiny particle accelerators that fired their beams through GIANT TANKS of reactant that was intended to neutralize the input beams on-the-fly. Some small percentage of the particles got neutralized, and the rest bounced off the outside of the magnetic bottle into a beam dump. Seeing the size of the equipment made me realize that tokamak fusion is probably a dead end for power generation -- if it can be made to work at all (in the sense of achieving, say, 10x heat gain), the ancillary equipment is HUGE and it's not at all clear that economies of scale are enough to make it worthwhile.
The Farnsworth-Hirsch type fusors have the advantage that you can fire in charged particles -- they rattle around and lose some of their kinetic energy, and after that they're trapped in a normal potential well. Like muon-catalyzed fusion machines, the Farnsworth fusor is in a race to get the energy out of a fusible nucleus before it leaks away -- but fresh hydrogen or deuterium ions are much, much cheaper than muons, and it seems to have a better chance of working.
(Remember muon-catalyzed fusion? Muons act like electrons, only more massive -- so atoms that have an electron replaced with a muon get smaller [it's a quantum thing], bringing the nuclei closer together and boosting the fusion rate. You can get a pretty high fusion rate (a few fusions per muon per microsecond) at close to room temperature in pretty tame materials. The problem is that muons only last about two microseconds before decaying into energy, neutrinos, and electrons -- so you have to make several hundred fusions per microsecond, to make the energy worth the effort of making a muon in the first place. Nobody was able to make it pay off.)
Re:I don't normally say things like this, but (Score:2, Informative)
In reality, after running the reactor for 20-40 years, you have a radioactive shell. You also get a small amount of radioactivity leakage in the nearby environment.
It's miniscule compared to fission of course, but it does exist. The reactor and components need to be decommissioned and disposed of (which, were we smart, would involve putting them in the Marianas trench and folding them back into the earth's mantle to be reprocessed.
However, the cost of disposal over the entire lifetime of disposal must always be included in any comparisons of costs of fission and fusion projects. We normally treat these as externalities, but they should be dealt with as intrinsic costs, just as we add scubbing costs for emissions treatment for coal plants.
Re:Electrostatic confinement (Score:3, Informative)
[harvard.edu]
Re:Electrostatic confinement (Score:5, Informative)
Lastly, your love of the Farnsworth fusor as a power device is odd. Electrostatic conefinement devices cannot achieve the power densities necessary to be a commercial power source (several GW). If you look at current experiments (http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/ftisite1.htm [wisc.edu]) the applications are many and important, but none are commercial power. I like these devices but mainly because their simplicity allows them to be portable.
The tokamak is not without its problems (alpha-ash, exhaust heat flux, steady-state operations), but it also has no competitors when you look at the absolute plasma pressures achieved. Overall, people should still realize that ITER is an experiment and not a demo reactor. While there is confidence that ITER can be run at it's target Q=10 (10 times more fusion power than input), this is formed from scaling previous experiments and needs to be verified.
Re:Environmentalists from bizarro world. (Score:3, Informative)
A task force reccomended that we build 25 nuclear reactors.
The greenies are saying that it'll be a environmental disaster.
What would they prefer? 25 coal power plants?
(Just if you dont know, Most of Australia's power is from coal and we have no nuclear)
Funding (Score:2, Informative)
"the participating members of the ITER cooperation agreed on the following division of funding contributions: 50% by the hosting member, the European Union and 10% by each non-hosting member (the six non-host partners will now contribute 6/11th of the total cost)" ITER [wikipedia.org]
Robert Bussard / EMC2 (Score:3, Informative)
It's a very technical but interesting talk about these alternate and simpler approaches to fusion confinement. I'm interested if some knowledgeable people could comment on his ideas and designs. He sounds like he's got something. What he explains about politics around funding of the project sounds pretty typical of the government.
Link (Google Video):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=199632184
Re:Electrostatic confinement (Score:2, Informative)
While Farnsworth's device is rather impractical, the overall idea is very solid. The thing I find appealing is that this device relies on a central force varying as 1/r^2--electromagnetism--in the same way as gravity works in a star. There is no plasma instability to worry about, and the scaling laws are extremely favorable. Obviously, we can't make use of gravity, but Bussard has found a way to efficiently create a deep electrostatic potential well through magnetic confinement. This much is certain from the field configuration, which is as much a work of art as it science.
Wether this well can be maintained efficiently in the presence of a plasma, is another question. Obviously, its presence will flatten the well, but it has another curious side effect--it compresses the field lines around the point cusps, which improves electron confinement even further. It really is a brilliant configuration. From Bussard's google talk [google.com], I am highly inclined to believe that this could become a workable high-gain machine.
A machine of this sort has so many advantages, that it would be ludicrous not to at least follow up on his work. To name a few, it is physically small, very simply, can burn aneutronic p-B11 as fuel, and is dirt cheap. I think it will be a long time before we can put a tokamak into space.
As for the results of current IEC research, they are hardly surprising. If the tokamak were funded at similar levels, I dare not think what it would have to show. I do not mean to disparage the science being done, but comparing these results is as unreasonable as ignoring all other alternative efforts.
Re:Cool! (Score:4, Informative)
the difficult bit is getting more usable energy out than is put in. One important milestone on the way to achiving that is to get a plasma that will keep fusing without external heating, hopefully iter will achive this milestone.
Re:I don't normally say things like this, but (Score:3, Informative)
I'm doing my masters in fusion. Grandparent is indeed correct. The reason being, the products of the fusion reaction are regular helium, and neutrons. The neutrons will activate the building which is the source of the low level waste. So we just keep things that get really hot out of the reactor design.
Right now, after ITER's 10 year lifetime, the only components that will need to be considered nuclear waste is are the tungsten components of the first wall (the wall facing the plasma) The products of activated tungsten have a very short half life, so after a year or so, the copper heat sinks will be the hottest components, and they'll be cooler than the tonnes of medical nuclear waste that gets shipped in and out of hospitals every year. There will be no leakage as neither tungsten nor copper are water soluble. The bigger risk is a steam explosion, which has the potential to release some tritiated water and maybe some tungsten oxide (some of which would have been activated by the neutrons) into the local community. But ITER is designed, that in the worst case scenario, there would be no need for evacuation. http://www.iter.org/a/index_faq.htm [iter.org] Choose the safety bullet to read about this. The worst case scenario is assuming the worst possible weather conditions, and that 100% of anything radioactive that could possibly be in the reactor becomes airborne and ingestible.
The trench is an interesting idea. Mind you, the really hot nuclear waste (spent fission fuel rods) are packed full of useable uranium. They can be re-refined and used again. We just... don't yet.
Aha. Costs. I was just at a conference where they were discussing the finer points of ITER. Trust me. International funding sources + over 10 years of them bickering over costs. Decommissioning costs have been included right down to the cardboard boxes for the scientists to pack up their offices.
Re:Agree! $ per W is important (Score:3, Informative)
Give me an efficient cell and then I can go look into the materials science, process engineering, and related fields to come up with efficiencies of scale and manufacturing. I've been doing that most of my life, both in IT and other engineering fields, it isn't that hard. Just skull sweat, a willingness to experiment, and time (although not that much of the latter). I'm not even unique in that regard. Give me more than one design and I can then run econometric analyses on life-cycle and production costs to evaluate which is the better choice. All the same, just numbers.