Green Light For ITER Fusion Project

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...

20 good funding years

[i_should_be_working]

Estimates of when fusion would be a viable energy source didn't take into account years of under-funding. ITER could have been done years ago.

Re:Cool!

[Josh Lindenmuth]

Considering that the U.S. uses over a quarter of the world's energy, I think the only thing cool about the project is that we're only contributing 10% of the total cost. The problem is that the reactor will take designs that have not been terribly successful at a smaller scale and try to prove that all of a sudden they would become commercially viable at a large scale.

Instead of devoting Billions to developing a large reactor on relatively low-yield/high-cost technology, I'd rather see the U.S. spend these Billions on researching how to create a more productive and economical fusion reaction ... then once the research creates results we can devote the resources to building a test reactor. Apparently the U.S. has been thinking along similar lines since they've wavered back and forth on the project for so long, and in the end committed only a token amount towards the project.

Re:I don't normally say things like this, but

[snarkh]

No, it is not a trivial amount of money. Even if it works it will need to work in a commercially feasible way, which at this point seems not just uncertain, but improbable. There is a lot of alternative sources of energy, such as solar energy, tidal waves, geothermal, etc. An investment of that scale would benefit any of them tremendously.

Huge amounts of money have already been sunk in making fusion work over the last 40 years with negligible results. The scientists keep promising and keep getting funded, even though payoff is always 30 years in the future. Such investments would benefit many other areas of science.

Consider also that $12bln is more than twice
the budget of NSF (National Science Foundation), which is the primary funding body for all non-medical science in the US!

Re:I don't normally say things like this, but

[maxwell demon]

The Apollo program did cost an estimated $135 billion in today's dollars. [wikipedia.org] And the expected payoff was what?
$12 billion is less that 1/10 of that. And it might give us a great source of energy.

ITER doesn't even address a major problem.

[Phanatic1a]

ITER gets a lot of press, but there's an equally large obstacle to commercial fusion that it doesn't even address: the materials issues.

A commercial fusion plant is going to produce a tremendous neutron flux, orders of magnitude greater than that seen in modern fission plants. So many neutrons will be produced that every single atom in the reactor vessel is can be expected to be struck and displaced several hundred times over a 30-year life cycle, and you're actually going to get a small number of nuclear reactions that will produce minute hydrogen and helium bubbles at lattice boundaries. There are no known suitable materials that can handle that kind of neutron exposure without swelling, cracking, degrading, becoming extremely brittle, and so forth. This would be Bad.

ITER isn't going to generate the kinds of neutron flux you'd need to even explore those issues. ITER's going to generate about 3 displacements per atom, not 300. There is another facility, IFMIF, intended to research this by generating similar neutron fluxes to what you'd see in a real fusion reactor, but it's only at the design stages right now, and won't come on line for long after ITER does.

Getting the fusion right is only part of the problem, and it's possibly the easier part. It's an engineering problem. But the materials issue might not be solvable, because the right materials might just not exist.

Folks, there are huge amounts of uranium and thorium around, and we do not have time to wait until we figure out fusion to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere. By the time we even come close to exhausting our sources of fissile fuel, we should have learned how to construct large-scale orbital structures, and once we can do that we won't even *need* fusion. It's entirely possible that commercial fusion will never happen.

Commercial Fusion Power?

[careysub]

I doubt that the 2040 "demonstration power plant" mentioned in the article equates to a "commercial reactor". Since ITER will produce heat but no electricity, and will be smaller than a commercial scale system by a factor of 10 to 20, the demonstration power plant will presumably be *prototype* of an electricity producing plant, but not a full-scale commercial system. Commercial availability would be years after that.

The economics of fusion power are, unfortunately, quite depressing. There was a short article on this in Science, 10 March 2006 (p. 1380). It estimated that the the capital cost for the blanket-shield alone in a 1 GWe powerplant "amounts to $1800/kWe of rated capacity--more than nuclear fission reactor plants cost today". All the other extravagantly high tech equipment and construction costs are in addition to this. It posits a total capital cost of $15,000/kWe of plant rating.

Is there any other alternative energy scheme that is seriously proposed that is *more* expensive than this?

Re:Cool!

[Josh Lindenmuth]

They will, but not yet ... currently China expends about 15% of the world's energy, the U.S. about 25%. [worldpopul...alance.org] In the next couple decades though, China should take the lead.

Also, our per capita energy expenditure is massively higher than China's:
U.S. - 11,571 KWh per person
China - 637 KWh per person

It's scary to think of China's demands if their per capita wealth (and consumption) reaches levels anywhere close to that of the U.S.

New Math?

[martyb]

FTFA:

The EU will pay 50 per cent of the cost to build the experimental reactor, with the six other parties contributing 10 per cent each.

That works out to 110% of the cost -- let's hope their science is better than the [reporter's] math!

Re:Electrostatic confinement

[netwiz]

What are your thoughts on Dense Plasma Focus devices? Eric Lerner's device seems feasible, save the complex electrical gear to drive the discharge into the reactants. The collapsing magnetic field acheives the inequilibrium needed to prevent most of the electron heating losses in the plasma, resulting in a significantly increased reaction rate.

Re:Electrostatic confinement

[doctorkropotkin]

Interesting. I'd be fascinated to hear your comments on Dr Bussard's claims to have an electrostatic confinement fusion device close to production ready. $200 million and 5 years sounds a whole lot better than $10 billion and 20+ years. You can view his tech talk at Google here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846 673788606 [google.com]

Re:Environmentalists from bizarro world.

[StressedEd]

Just if you dont know, Most of Australia's power is from coal and we have no nuclear

Ironic as Australia is swimming in Uranium [uic.com.au], with the largest reserves in the world.

Funny how we'd go from digging up one type of fossil fuel (coal - remenents of old biological matter) to another (uranium - remenents of exceedingly old supernovae).