ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a 35-nation effort to create electricity from nuclear fusion, has torn up its project plans and pushed operations of its tokamak back by at least eight years. Tokamaks are typically designed around a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber, inside of which gases are subjected …
Pascal Monett,
I was hoping to see fusion in my lifetime.
Well - just try harder. And keep taking the monkey glands.
Rincewind managed to continually outrun Death. Whereas Albert survived by cooking his dinner. But Bill & Ted may have had the best solution, by beating him at Twister.
Plenty of other groups researching other methods of fusion power.
The all get way less funding and yet many started researching later are arguably much closer to actually achieving something workable than ITER, which has long looked like a make-work programme for studying high energy plasma science, rather than every being able to generate power.
How Many Years Away is Fusion Energy? A Review
Historically, it has been a running quip that ‘fusion is always 30 years away. ... Thus arises the following question: is the age-long sarcasm of “fusion is always 30 years away” still valid in 2023? This paper answers this question through a literature review of researchers' expectations about when fusion energy will be “ready” for over the past 40 years.
And my money's on never. The promises seem to have moved backwards since I was at uni from ten years in the future to 15 - 30 years off now.
And through all those decades it's taking to get fusion up to the size of less than half a modern power station, solar power is becoming more abundant and cheaper.. With batteries, hydro storage and HV transmission, there'll be no chance of fusion offering cheaper power considering all the up-front investment...
Always was.
Always will be.
Still ensuring Europe should remain self-sufficient in it's supply of Plasma Physics PhD's for the foreseeable future*
*The only way they'll generate renewable energy is by putting them all on giant hamster wheels connected to alternators.
renewable energy
Fusion isn't renewable - it uses up lithium & deuterium. We have a lot of deuterium in the sea although it's a bit of a bugger to extract. We have considerably less lithium which is also highly in demand elsewhere of course. Neutrons released from the fusion reaction transmute the lithium to provide the tritium - of which we have a tiny supply from elsewhere - that will be fused with the deuterium in a commercial reactor. Or at least that's the idea. Nobody's every even demostrated that this could be implemented continuously in a working reactor.
Neither is it going to be clean as suggested in the article. There's going to be a lot of neutron-irratiated scrap to handle during and after a reactor's lifetime, a fact that is always omitted by the vested interests driving the agenda. The cost and difficulty of decommissioning JET - which only ever fused tiny amounts of precious tritium with hydrogen - demostrates this clearly.
And I have my doubts that it'll be commercially able to compete with actual renewables but would only be useful for baseload fill-in if transcontinental super-grids aren't created or aren't able to move available capacity about.
We have effectively unlimited lithium. Don't be confused by where we are mining it today, there are plenty of other places to get it (most especially the ocean) but no one is going to pay more to get it from a more expensive source until the price being paid for it goes up enough that they can make a profit doing so.
Battery technology will have moved beyond lithium long before any commercial fusion plants using it could ever open up, and we'd be able to get enough lithium to power the world just from EVs with lithium batteries that are totaled in car wrecks every year.
Unlimited Lithium-7 but not so much Lithium-6 which is the hard to separate isotope needed for the reaction to produce Tritium, a reaction that so far has only been done at laboratory scale.
As for Deuterium, no real problem, we can get as much as we might need from the oceans.
That's only if the type of fusion being explored by ITER is what ends up winning. I'm rooting for Helion Energy to succeed in their goal of aneutronic fusion. One of the shorter term goals they claim they will demonstrate soon is production of He3 via deuterium fusion. Even if that costs energy today being able to produce He3 in quantity will aid in fusion research and avoid all the crazy talk about He3 lunar mining that push fusion out way beyond the status quo "20-30 years from now" horizon.
There is a lot of lithium. The numbers normally quoted are for reserves, which are currently economic to use. This changes as the cost of lithium fluctuates and also as new extraction techniques are developed.
The huge difference between reserves and resources matters.
https://geologyhub.com/difference-between-resource-and-reserve/
Even ignoring the technical challenges, projects organised & funded like this (of which there are many of different flavors) have a habit of having their milestones dissappear over the horizon as the underlying incentives are all about keeping the project (& everyone's jobs) going for as long as possible.
Actually delivering isn't the priority.
It shouldn't work like that but it inevitably does, which is great while you're riding that train but not so good for anyone wanting the end product.
Been there, done that.
It is worth remembering, though, that the research outcomes are rarely those predicted either. This is the nature of research. In reality, the outcomes are likely to be much more varied and useful than just "power from fusion in x years", including advances and new techniques in material science, engineering, construction, and a whole raft of other areas, which will all benefit mankind as a whole.
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More like the world's largest example of sunk cost fallacy. I'm willing to bet that at least one of the commercial fusion companies out there will have a net energy positive reactor, if not an operational plant connected to the grid, before ITER's first plasma. They really ought to cut their losses, and if they really want to keep spending billions of taxpayer's money, then come up with a new design based on current technologies, and focused on what would be most helpful to the commercial fusion efforts. The current design is too late and too dated to be much use to anyone.
'I'm willing to bet that at least one of the commercial fusion companies out there will have a net energy positive reactor, if not an operational plant connected to the grid, before ITER's first plasma.'
So much so you are willing to invest your own cold hard cash?
Because that is what the private enterprise projects require and to be frank, the narrative coming out of them will tend towards the more wildly optimistic to attract that investment.
I see ITER more as a collaborative humanity project, hopefully with all the subsequent spin offs that past projects such as the race to the Moon have generated.
I don't think anyone believed the initial budget estimates and timescales, especially the involved States.
Tokamaks are a dead end when it comes to power generation, this was a Tokamak because it's the only thing we knew how to build on this scale when the project was agreed.
In many ways ITER is the maximally suboptimal setup. It's a massive multi-government operation, but with every government contributing the part that they want to build, not just putting in money.
It's an experiment, but built on power station scale, and to power station regulations.
The best analogy is if in 1930, the world had come together to make intercontinental air travel possible and decided to build a mile long Zeppelin - because that was the safest technology.
>Zeppelins ended up being filled with hydrogen as the US wouldn't supply the preferred helium.
That's kind of the problem with ITER. Each member country decides which bit they want to build - rather than just paying into a pot like the infrastructure parts of CERN.
There are some cool technologies that everyone wants to develop, so you have more potential makers for these bits than you actually need.
There are other bits that only a country with an advanced weapons program knows how to do, but they don't necessarily want to build those and show what they know.
There are some boring parts that nobody wants to build
To further complicate matters, there are some parts that have to be built on site. If you are eg. a Korean company, whats the politics/economics of building a factory in France and staffing it with Korean workers (and their families?) for 5years to make superconducting coils and then tearing all that down on delivery? Do your workers get French labour protection, do spouses get work permits?
I am inclined to agree with tony72.
At this point, we should let commercial entities work (un-subsidised!) on fusion and instead use all the state money currently being spent on ITER & the like on supporting renewable technology deployment and improvement - which starts reaping benefits peacemeal as soon as it's online, green hydrogren and kerosene for road transport, industry and aviation - which is much lower risk, and the replacement of gas powered domestic & commercial heating systems with heat-pump, solar thermal, solar-voltaic and other high efficiency low-carbon self-contained HVAC.
Not only will this have a chance of reducing our carbon output, it'll create far more diverse employment opportunities, reduce reliance on morally bankrupt fossil fuel companies and countries (Russia for example) and it'll save everyone money on their fuel bills.
Fusion research can continue but we have existential threats to address that it can have no possibility of addressing in time.
We already are doing more or less what you say: Pretty much all the renewable technology deployment and improvement being deployed right now are coming from private companies productising and commercialising the research that was done years ago by publicly funded research teams!
The same with the commercial fusion "research" outfits. The are using the plasma models, control algorithms, numerical models, material science ... yada ... yada ... that researchers at universities prepared for them.
This is the compromise we made: Commercial entities are Crap at research, and Public entities are Useless at productisation.
If we drop fusion research, the "knowledge pipeline" feeding the commercial companies will dry up and they will croak / run off with investors money about 5 years later.
Such as this one by Tokamak Energy that look like they may actually be producing power in the 2030's. They have opted for a design more along the lines of the SMR fission technology that uses more small machines, making construction much, much easier.
> that look like they may actually be producing power in the 2030's
Got any third-party evaluations on that, or are we just relying on company white papers and websites for that claim?
Multiple projects on an as-yet unachieved goal is generally a Good Thing, but we best to be guardedly sceptical about the ability of a company to be as willing as a project like ITER to admit when things are difficult.
Turns out this is difficult to do with magnets. Even really big ones. The real Sun has mastered a trick called gravity over a few billion years - that's how it keeps its fusion reactor going. But for gravity you need to have something really "vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big"... I mean, you may think it's a long way around that toroidal camera, but that's just peanuts...
The one with H2G2 in the pocket, thank you. --------->
The best solution looks like simply making a magnet so fiendishly complicated that the plasma gets confused trying to escape.
Anyone who has tried to service a fancy German car will appreciate the Wendelstein_7-X
And don't forget that that's 50MW of power inserted into the plasma (not the power required to insert that power which is about an order of magnitude greater), and that the 500MW is thermal power (mostly in the form of neutrons) which somehow has to be harvested.
We're very far a way from any form of "break even" regardless of what the 50/500 headline suggests.
That's right. An often quoted estimate is:
80 MW for magnetic containment
150 MW for heating
100 MW "Various"
But lets be fair - the stated purpose of ITER is not to make a reactor that produces electric power - that was always supposed to be the next one called "DEMO".
It is wilful misunderstanding or miscommunication and the press' inexperience that has caused this confusion.
When(!) we finally get this mythical source of infinitesimally cheap power we can short-circuit the greenhouse effect entirely and just dump all our waste heat (from refrigeration/aircon or heating according to geography) _directly_ into the atmosphere.
Be careful what you wish for!
> Vacuum flasks work quite well, you know!
The Earth's has large radiating surface, you know, and it has been pretty good at radiating out the Sun's incident heat for a few years now[1]. Assuming we *let* the radiation reach the outside of the atmosphere, our extra heat output is piffling compared to the incoming[2] energy and will zoom out into the Cosmos just as quickly as we can pump it out[3]
[1] "And the award for understatement goes to..."
[2] Until we reach the stage that the Puppeteers did, which will - take us a while (remind me, how stable are Klemperer[4] Rosettes again?)
[3] Ok, there will be an increase in the temperature required to increase the radiant energy, but as that is a fourth power ratio in absolute temperature - the increase is left as an exercise for the reader, but it isn't comparable to the heating due to trapping the Sun's energy.
[4] Note where the 'l' goes, Larry.
Anthropogenic heat output is - and will likely* remain - trivial compared to incident solar radiation, even assuming ITER or it's progeny start generating useful power.
[Earth currently absorbs approximately 500 Exa Watt Hours of energy from the sun annually.]
[* I do not make predictions about how the escalating use of AI-bollox might affect this calculus.]
> Anthropogenic heat output is - and will likely* remain - trivial compared to incident solar radiation,
Cue the comments about "so, you do admit humans are not responsible for warming up the Earth"*
* not admitting any difference between heat coming in and stopping it getting out again
I don't get the down votes here. What he is saying: We produce even more heat, more efficiently than ever before, which has to go somewhere. Replacing the greenhouse effect as warming factor. The wording is somewhat provoking, but my physics brain does not see an error here.
There are two (and only two) viable ways to make electricity from nuclear fusion.
One is to place 2x10^30kg of mostly hydrogen at a safe distance (about 150 million km is recommended), and allow it to spontaneously fuse under its own gravity. We call this method "solar power", and it's OK as long as you don't mind not getting any new electricity at night, or when it's cloudy.
The other is to drop an H-bomb into a deep hole, and then use existing geothermal technology to make electricity from the resulting hot rocks. This is great if you live in a place where A) Geothermal energy is hard to exploit due to a thick layer of cold rocks; And B)You are not subject to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty with regards to nuclear weapons.
Building tokamaks and hoping to get more energy out than you need to put in is a mug's game. If you want a controlled and efficient way to extract electricity by manipulating the Strong Nuclear Force, fission is a FAR better option than fusion.
Fission is easier, but that doesnt make it better. Burning Coal is even easier and cheaper, but I dont think anyone would say it's the way to go in the future.
Fusion is hard, but the potential is excellent. Are we there yet, no. But the number of new technologies that are already being developed, and deployed and which you never hear about are well worth the cost.
If you look at the Apollo Program, if you look at only the results, bringing back a few space rocks, it seems a ridiculous waste of money. But the amount of new technologies developed, high quality research obtained, lessons learned for future space flight, and all the rest, it would be almost impossible for anyone to claim it wasnt a worthwhile project.
Research is hard, and expensive. But without we'd still be sitting around in caves, banging rocks together...
Fission is easier, but that doesnt make it better. Burning Coal is even easier and cheaper
Have a read of this article by Otto Frisch On the Feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations
The recent discovery of coal (black, fossilized plant remains) in a number of places offers an interesting alternative to the production of power from fission. Some of the places where coal has been found show indeed signs of previous exploitation by prehistoric men, who, however, probably used it for jewels and to blacken their faces at religious ceremonies.
The power potentials depend on the fact that coal can be readily oxidized, with the production of a high temperature and energy of about 0.0000001 megawatt days per gram. That is, of course, very little, but large amounts of coal (perhaps millions of tons) appear to be available.
The chief advantage is that the critical amount is very much smaller for coal than for any fissile material. Fission plants become, as is well known, uneconomical below 50 megawatts, and a coal-driven plant may be competitive for small communities (such as small islands) with small power requirements.
...
... Only on Iceland!
Most other places you can get a puny and pathetic geothermal heat flux at about 65 mW/m2.
The problem becomes: First, you have to capture the heat from a very large area. Then you have to go really deep, kilometers deep, to get that heat at the kind of temperature that will allow the thermodymamics to work decently. If you want any electricity from it all. If you just want to heat some houses, then you can use a heat pump at the surface level and save yourself millions in stranded investment.
PS:
The sun gives about 700 W/m2 up here in the Nordics. About 20% percent of that flux can be converted to electriclty directly with no fuss.
Politicians are "throwing money at" fusion?
£180m over 4 years counts as "fusion never".
This has always been the problem with fusion. In comparison to other particle physics projects, it's been massively underfunded for decades. I attended a lecture by someone who was working on the ITER project, and the historical funding data presented explained why we are nowhere near where we should be.
The project itself has a huge amount of rework to do after stress corrosion cracks were discovered in the welds that fixed some of the cooling pipes to vacuum vessel sectors. There's around 23Km of pipe to remove and re-weld. This has set the project back nearly two years (a year to work out what to do, and a year to undertake the work).
Like others, I would be ecstatic to see any form of positive results during my lifetime, but I'm seriously doubting it now. That said, if I ever find myself in the south of France on the right weekend, I'd definitely sign up for the full tour.
UK was in ITER as part of Euroatom, the Eu is arguing that the UK can only remain by re-joining Euratom rather than becoming a regular member like all the other none-European countries.
This seems a little disingenuous, since one of the reasons for building it in France was that it was suitably politically neutral that, like CERN, you could have members that were effectively at war with each other.
At one point the UK was a vital member since JET (in Oxford) was the only source of Tritium available to anyone outside a couple of weapons labs. Since JET shut down, I'm not sure where they are planning to get the Tritium from
Well, actually last year very successful. Will soon reach 30 minutes continuous burn.
Erm, I don't think any such thing as been shown. On the contrary, fusion experiments have consistently shown over decades that it's nigh on impossible to sustain fusion in a lab environment, even using the most exotic fuels and containers. For some reason, there's now this misplaced optimism that if only you make it bigger and more exotic and much, much more expensive, finally it might work. It's as if steam power couldn't work until you had built the Royal Scot, or the Wright Brothers had no success with heavier-than-air flight until they'd build the Airbus A380.
Furthermore, the best you could hope for in the end is a source of heat in the form of highly energetic neutrons which will irradiate the reactor vessel, and in turn make it radioactive. When JET ran for less than a minute, the vessel could not be entered for a week afterwards. And even if you manage to create this heat and turn it into power, still the best you can hope for is a power station which is ludicrously expensive to build, the fuel is ludicrously expensive (inherently so), and the operations and maintenance are ludicrously expensive.
Sure, solar panels don't work when it's dark. But it's always sunny (or windy) somewhere in the world. A trans-global grid is well within the realms of technical feasibility. Sadly, perhaps not politically in the current world we live in.
Quote
" the fuel is ludicrously expensive (inherently so)"
The fuel is the cheapest part of the project consisting of heavy water, and lithium
Current prices are 4000/kg for the water and 12.50/kg for lithium
Tritium is what I was thinking of - at about $30,000 per gram if you believe the webs. Tritium breeding from lithium is still currently a pipedream.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started
On the positive side they seem to have cracked time travel while they've been waiting for self-sustaining fusion - from the press release linked in the article:
"The ITER Organization convened a press conference on 3 July to provide more details of the project baseline proposal submitted to the ITER Council on 19-20 July"
"On the positive side they seem to have cracked time travel while they've been waiting for self-sustaining fusion"
If only! Wouldn't have to stuff around with dodgy 6kilotonne superconducting* magnets - just use time tech to send the escaping H/He ions back in time to the reaction initiation and in space to centre of the chamber. Although I am not sure if you actually end up with an H bomb but you will find out, but only in the negative, when you hit the start button.
* I assume chockers with liquid He? A quenching 6kt magnet doesn't bear thinking about.
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