10 ms·

ITER Tokamak: First Plasma Through High-Fusion-Gain Deuterium-Tritium Operation

97 points by ArtWomb 8y ago

twtw 8y ago
HN title seems misleading. I read it as ITER has achieved first fusion, when in fact the news is a revised plan.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > first fusion We already have fusion. We just don't have fusion that sustains itself. Unless this is a specific term that I'm not understanding?
  - foobarbecue 8y ago
    No fusion yet at ITER. They've only just started building it.
  - ikeyany 8y ago
    I think they mean 'first plasma' which is the name for when a reactor generates a plasma for the first time.
- tempay 8y ago
  It hasn't, construction has only just began of the main components and ITER should produce it's first plasma in 2025.[1] [1] https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones#135 https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones#135
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
moneytide1 8y ago
Whatever happened to the German stellarator? Seem to recall Merkel being present for one of the first tests a few years back, ITER seems to get more coverage
- sien 8y ago
  It's going really well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X It's not, however, something that designed to directly head toward fusion power itself but instead to better understand components that could be improved to make fusion power. In addition now with fusion there are heap of companies trying to get fusion power going in about a decade or so. Probably the most interesting of which are: https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/ https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/ and https://www.cfs.energy/ https://www.cfs.energy/ Who are both using new developments in high temperature superconducting tape fabrication to increase the magnetic field to get to fusion faster than ITER.
  - bencompanion 8y ago
    There was some interesting and encouraging info out of Korea's KSTAR tokamak recently: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180910111302.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180910111302.h... - the team there have been working on stabilising the plasma inside tokamaks, and have had pretty good success by the sounds of things.
  - bdamm 8y ago
    Why not the vortex compression types of "reactors"? a.la http://generalfusion.com/ http://generalfusion.com/
    - nielsbot 8y ago
      Do you know how close they are to a "real" reactor? Their website seems light on details about that...
    - pfdietz 8y ago
      General Fusion recently gave up on their original design (a spheromak-type plasma inside an imploding liquid metal vortex.) Instead, they're going to a spherical tokamaka where liquid metal compresses the plasma from the outside. In this new concept, there is now a solid wall on the inside that is not shielded from the plasma by a thick layer of liquid metal. That means power density limits due to limits on wall loading will apply to their reactor, just as they do to conventional DT magnetic fusion reactor schemes. So, the major theoretical engineering advantage of their idea has been lost.
Animats 8y ago
Oh, this is just the plan for 2025-203x. I thought maybe they'd actually got it running.
- mjfl 8y ago
  What if I told you that even if everything goes perfectly by 2045, ITER is not a power plant, just a proof of principle? They would have to do further engineering to figure out how to effectively convert the heat generated into electricity.
  - tim333 8y ago
    I'm not sure if they shouldn't rethink the ITER plan now magnets are much stronger and build something like the MIT design instead (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/09/nuclear-fusion-on-brink-of-being-realised-say-mit-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/09/nuclear-...). There seems to be a bit of a sunk cost fallacy going on at ITER.
    - njarboe 8y ago
      ITER is not the route to an economical fusion reactor. The supporters have even stopped promoting it as such. It is now a research reactor. We may find out some novel information on how plasma behaves in a certain regime, but this data is not likely to be useful in building a future reactor. The amount of resources that have been diverted from fundamental fusion research to be spent pouring cement and building magnets is a tragedy. We should have a thousand $3 million dollar or a hundred $30 million dollar experimental reactors, not this monstrosity.
      - pas 8y ago
        Scale is everything for fusion (plasma). ITER is very important, as it represents the current most likely way. (Hence the name.) That said, it's big, design by committee, slow, meticulous, etc. It's not a fail fast market-driven experiment. Also, most of the money is spent on the fundamentals, planning, developing operational knowhow, basic material science and plasma vessel engineering. All in all, it could be better, but at least ITER is actually being built. MIT's ARC is still somewhere between "secured funding for a scaled down prototype" and actually will build something. Though it's great news, that they got funding (from Eni, an Italian energy company).
calebh 8y ago
What about polywell fusion? Can anyone with expertise comment on this design?
- Thorondor 8y ago
  Most mainstream physicists believe that the polywell design cannot work due to bremsstrahlung and electron cusp losses, as described by Rider. [0] Bussard and some of his followers have argued against some assumptions made in the Rider paper, but as far as I know, no one has found any loopholes big enough to allow a practical, power-producing reactor. If you're interested in alternative fusion reactor designs, though, you might want to look into the levitated dipole. [1] There is a lot of evidence suggesting that this design avoids most of the major problems that plague tokamak development. [2][3] The remaining obstacles (as far as I can tell, mainly interchange instabilities and engineering difficulties) don't seem insurmountable to me. MIT made a serious attempt to build a levitated dipole reactor in the late 2000's, but unfortunately, the US Department of Energy cut off all funding in 2011. [0] http://fsl.npre.illinois.edu/IEC/Rider,%20Phys.ofPlasmas1995.pdf http://fsl.npre.illinois.edu/IEC/Rider,%20Phys.ofPlasmas1995... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitated_dipole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitated_dipole [2] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/92cb/3e1ec34a707b2920f1c03a6d1f4f2497d72b.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/92cb/3e1ec34a707b2920f1c03a... [3] https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/95395/99ja014_full.pdf?sequence=1 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/95395/99ja014...
  - andrepd 8y ago
    >US Department of Energy cut off all funding in 2011 Sigh.
- nugga 8y ago
  I've been occasionally following the team that continued Bussard's work and they claim they can prove they can make it work in a couple years for a few million or something. Interview with the project lead: https://www.thefusionpodcast.com/itunes/2018/8/27/dr-jaeyoung-park https://www.thefusionpodcast.com/itunes/2018/8/27/dr-jaeyoun...
nickik 8y ago
This is way big of a project. There are so many promising approches, to put that much money into one very long very expensive mega project. An international competition with a wider array of technology and more iterative could have achived more. If you look how far some organisations get with tiny amounts of funding.
- FrojoS 8y ago
  Some goals require large resources. E.g. the moon landings.
  - nickik 8y ago
    Some goals do but many projects with much less money have achieved impressive results in fusion with far, far less money. Fusion is very much an exploration of different methods and we focus 99% research on one approach.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  Most research advances are either: - Small, incremental, predictable improvements, due to more accurate modelling, tighter tolerances, bigger budgets, etc. - Big breakthroughs, usually on shoestring budgets. The largest impact comes from the latter, but they're very rare and unpredictable. We might fund thousands of small projects over decades and see nothing particularly substantial. Big budget projects are riskier, since we can't fund many of them. Hence these tend to be the first type of project: where we can be quite confident on the capabilities and outcomes, so we'll see some improvement; even though it might not be as promising as the possibilities claimed by umpteen smaller projects. It's also easier for individual institutions, companies, countries, etc. to fund smaller projects themselves. There's no point wading through the politics required to pool resources into a large international collaboration, if we're just going to divide up those resources between a bunch of small projects anyway ;)
  - nickik 8y ago
    > The largest impact comes from the latter, but they're very rare and unpredictable. We might fund thousands of small projects over decades and see nothing particularly substantial. But that is not the case in fusion. We had many advances in fusion by small companies. > here's no point wading through the politics required to pool resources into a large international collaboration, if we're just going to divide up those resources between a bunch of small projects anyway ;) I do understand the political problem. However still it could be collaboration for a contest, rather then organize this project as a multi country technical problem. And I would even be happy with just 3-5 projects that get many, many billions in the end. I mean lets be honest, if it costs $20 billion (and lets be honest it will be way more) to develop it will never be economical anyway. There are lots and lots of people who would be happy to get a couple million for some fusion projects. Others believe they could build a break even project with 10s millions. And we could reinforce projects that make rapid advancement. It would also create a large fusion industry with different companies going into 'supplier' mode and so on.
zeristor 8y ago
The Royal Society held a two day conference 6 months ago if anyone is interested. They’ve posted the audio files, video would have been nicer but audio is handy; https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2018/03/tokamak-development/ https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2018/03...
- zeristor 8y ago
  With the advent of REBCO superconductors things seem to be in flux.

97 points by ArtWomb 8y ago

twtw 8y ago

HN title seems misleading. I read it as ITER has achieved first fusion, when in fact the news is a revised plan.

saagarjha 8y ago
> first fusion We already have fusion. We just don't have fusion that sustains itself. Unless this is a specific term that I'm not understanding?
- foobarbecue 8y ago
  No fusion yet at ITER. They've only just started building it.
- ikeyany 8y ago
  I think they mean 'first plasma' which is the name for when a reactor generates a plasma for the first time.
tempay 8y ago
It hasn't, construction has only just began of the main components and ITER should produce it's first plasma in 2025.[1] [1] https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones#135 https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones#135
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

moneytide1 8y ago

Whatever happened to the German stellarator? Seem to recall Merkel being present for one of the first tests a few years back, ITER seems to get more coverage

sien 8y ago
It's going really well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X It's not, however, something that designed to directly head toward fusion power itself but instead to better understand components that could be improved to make fusion power. In addition now with fusion there are heap of companies trying to get fusion power going in about a decade or so. Probably the most interesting of which are: https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/ https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/ and https://www.cfs.energy/ https://www.cfs.energy/ Who are both using new developments in high temperature superconducting tape fabrication to increase the magnetic field to get to fusion faster than ITER.
- bencompanion 8y ago
  There was some interesting and encouraging info out of Korea's KSTAR tokamak recently: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180910111302.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180910111302.h... - the team there have been working on stabilising the plasma inside tokamaks, and have had pretty good success by the sounds of things.
- bdamm 8y ago
  Why not the vortex compression types of "reactors"? a.la http://generalfusion.com/ http://generalfusion.com/
  - nielsbot 8y ago
    Do you know how close they are to a "real" reactor? Their website seems light on details about that...
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    General Fusion recently gave up on their original design (a spheromak-type plasma inside an imploding liquid metal vortex.) Instead, they're going to a spherical tokamaka where liquid metal compresses the plasma from the outside. In this new concept, there is now a solid wall on the inside that is not shielded from the plasma by a thick layer of liquid metal. That means power density limits due to limits on wall loading will apply to their reactor, just as they do to conventional DT magnetic fusion reactor schemes. So, the major theoretical engineering advantage of their idea has been lost.

Animats 8y ago

Oh, this is just the plan for 2025-203x. I thought maybe they'd actually got it running.

mjfl 8y ago
What if I told you that even if everything goes perfectly by 2045, ITER is not a power plant, just a proof of principle? They would have to do further engineering to figure out how to effectively convert the heat generated into electricity.
- tim333 8y ago
  I'm not sure if they shouldn't rethink the ITER plan now magnets are much stronger and build something like the MIT design instead (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/09/nuclear-fusion-on-brink-of-being-realised-say-mit-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/09/nuclear-...). There seems to be a bit of a sunk cost fallacy going on at ITER.
  - njarboe 8y ago
    ITER is not the route to an economical fusion reactor. The supporters have even stopped promoting it as such. It is now a research reactor. We may find out some novel information on how plasma behaves in a certain regime, but this data is not likely to be useful in building a future reactor. The amount of resources that have been diverted from fundamental fusion research to be spent pouring cement and building magnets is a tragedy. We should have a thousand $3 million dollar or a hundred $30 million dollar experimental reactors, not this monstrosity.
    - pas 8y ago
      Scale is everything for fusion (plasma). ITER is very important, as it represents the current most likely way. (Hence the name.) That said, it's big, design by committee, slow, meticulous, etc. It's not a fail fast market-driven experiment. Also, most of the money is spent on the fundamentals, planning, developing operational knowhow, basic material science and plasma vessel engineering. All in all, it could be better, but at least ITER is actually being built. MIT's ARC is still somewhere between "secured funding for a scaled down prototype" and actually will build something. Though it's great news, that they got funding (from Eni, an Italian energy company).

calebh 8y ago

What about polywell fusion? Can anyone with expertise comment on this design?

Thorondor 8y ago
Most mainstream physicists believe that the polywell design cannot work due to bremsstrahlung and electron cusp losses, as described by Rider. [0] Bussard and some of his followers have argued against some assumptions made in the Rider paper, but as far as I know, no one has found any loopholes big enough to allow a practical, power-producing reactor. If you're interested in alternative fusion reactor designs, though, you might want to look into the levitated dipole. [1] There is a lot of evidence suggesting that this design avoids most of the major problems that plague tokamak development. [2][3] The remaining obstacles (as far as I can tell, mainly interchange instabilities and engineering difficulties) don't seem insurmountable to me. MIT made a serious attempt to build a levitated dipole reactor in the late 2000's, but unfortunately, the US Department of Energy cut off all funding in 2011. [0] http://fsl.npre.illinois.edu/IEC/Rider,%20Phys.ofPlasmas1995.pdf http://fsl.npre.illinois.edu/IEC/Rider,%20Phys.ofPlasmas1995... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitated_dipole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitated_dipole [2] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/92cb/3e1ec34a707b2920f1c03a6d1f4f2497d72b.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/92cb/3e1ec34a707b2920f1c03a... [3] https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/95395/99ja014_full.pdf?sequence=1 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/95395/99ja014...
- andrepd 8y ago
  >US Department of Energy cut off all funding in 2011 Sigh.
nugga 8y ago
I've been occasionally following the team that continued Bussard's work and they claim they can prove they can make it work in a couple years for a few million or something. Interview with the project lead: https://www.thefusionpodcast.com/itunes/2018/8/27/dr-jaeyoung-park https://www.thefusionpodcast.com/itunes/2018/8/27/dr-jaeyoun...

nickik 8y ago

This is way big of a project. There are so many promising approches, to put that much money into one very long very expensive mega project. An international competition with a wider array of technology and more iterative could have achived more. If you look how far some organisations get with tiny amounts of funding.

FrojoS 8y ago
Some goals require large resources. E.g. the moon landings.
- nickik 8y ago
  Some goals do but many projects with much less money have achieved impressive results in fusion with far, far less money. Fusion is very much an exploration of different methods and we focus 99% research on one approach.
chriswarbo 8y ago
Most research advances are either: - Small, incremental, predictable improvements, due to more accurate modelling, tighter tolerances, bigger budgets, etc. - Big breakthroughs, usually on shoestring budgets. The largest impact comes from the latter, but they're very rare and unpredictable. We might fund thousands of small projects over decades and see nothing particularly substantial. Big budget projects are riskier, since we can't fund many of them. Hence these tend to be the first type of project: where we can be quite confident on the capabilities and outcomes, so we'll see some improvement; even though it might not be as promising as the possibilities claimed by umpteen smaller projects. It's also easier for individual institutions, companies, countries, etc. to fund smaller projects themselves. There's no point wading through the politics required to pool resources into a large international collaboration, if we're just going to divide up those resources between a bunch of small projects anyway ;)
- nickik 8y ago
  > The largest impact comes from the latter, but they're very rare and unpredictable. We might fund thousands of small projects over decades and see nothing particularly substantial. But that is not the case in fusion. We had many advances in fusion by small companies. > here's no point wading through the politics required to pool resources into a large international collaboration, if we're just going to divide up those resources between a bunch of small projects anyway ;) I do understand the political problem. However still it could be collaboration for a contest, rather then organize this project as a multi country technical problem. And I would even be happy with just 3-5 projects that get many, many billions in the end. I mean lets be honest, if it costs $20 billion (and lets be honest it will be way more) to develop it will never be economical anyway. There are lots and lots of people who would be happy to get a couple million for some fusion projects. Others believe they could build a break even project with 10s millions. And we could reinforce projects that make rapid advancement. It would also create a large fusion industry with different companies going into 'supplier' mode and so on.

zeristor 8y ago

The Royal Society held a two day conference 6 months ago if anyone is interested. They’ve posted the audio files, video would have been nicer but audio is handy; https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2018/03/tokamak-development/ https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2018/03...

zeristor 8y ago
With the advent of REBCO superconductors things seem to be in flux.