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ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
- gautamcgoel 6y agoI think fusion is cool, but I also think it distracts from more important and promising approaches to clean power. No one has ever demonstrated a self-sustaining, net positive fusion reaction. It will probably take >30 years to make this technology cheap , safe and reliable and another >20 years to deploy it at scale. We don't have 50 years to wait on clean energy, we need it today. We should be focusing our attention on renewables, like solar, which are rapidly dropping in cost, and good 'ol nuclear power, which is already proven to be safe and reliable, instead of crossing our fingers and waiting for some magical tech to save us. We already have the tech, we just need to get serious about deploying it. I bet a concerted roll-out of nuclear + solar could cut US emissions due to electricity generation by at least 30% over the next 20 years. EDIT: I see this is getting some downvotes. I want to reiterate that I support fusion research, I am just saying that I don't believe fusion is the quickest or most realistic approach to reducing emissions.
- the-dude 6y agoDon't be so alarmist. We don't need it today.
- jansan 6y agoEverybody else but the ITER people are focusing on solar and wind. What more do you expect?
- spacephysics 6y agoI agree we should look at multiple possible paths for renewable energy, but to say that they shouldn’t work on this, is a bit far fetched. This assumes the researchers working on fusion can work on the other renewable energies, when that’s typically not the case with highly specialized fields. Further, estimating the time it takes for advancement with the described time magnitude is a frivolous pursuit, if you put any weight behind it. Within 5 years, sure let’s predict. But at 30 years, now we’re talking a bit too far into the future. It’s much harder to guesstimate what will occur from now to then. Lastly, if we assume it will take 30 years to produce a working model, then that only assumes we’re working on it today. If we could, let’s say, divert all scientists away from fusion research onto other renewables, the 30 year estimate would be perpetually pushed until we start working on it once more. Let’s have people who are passionate about their field pursue as many paths to solving the energy crisis as possible. We could have a breakthrough sooner than 30 years, which I would place money on.
- throwaway744678 6y agoYour argument is sound, but the issue is also budget allocation: financial resources are not infinite, and we must choose how to allocate them.
- pueblito 6y agoThat's a very good point, we need to allocate much more towards fusion R&D
- f6v 6y agoThere’s so much things to divert budget from to fuel energy research. Completely unrealistic, but think luxury cars, football player’s salaries, just to name a few.
- VyperCard 6y agoCoal subsidies …
- tenuousemphasis 6y agoMilitary industrial complex? Billionaires? The things you mentioned are literally nothingburger.
- adventured 6y agoIt's very clearly not a nothingburger. High paid professional athletes in the US today have the income of billionaires. Professional athletes earn around $200 billion in league salary each decade (it excludes endorsements, which tilts the point that much further if included). It's far more than all S&P 500 CEOs combined. Just the three major sports leagues in the US are at around $14 billion per year in salary. That excludes coaches, which now have very high salaries as well. Stripping it down further, all NBA players combined (a mere ~450 players or so) earn more in salary every year than all the S&P 500 CEOs combined. As of 2019 there were 122 players in Major League Baseball earning $10 million per year or more. The top 30 NBA players earn a combined $1 billion every year. Pretty funny, the notion that ~$80+ billion in income taxes every ten years, is supposedly a nothingburger. It's a lot of tax revenue, even if it pales next to US Military spending.
- cinntaile 6y agoCan you explain why and how this distracts from renewables? I don't get how you reached this conclusion.
- usui 6y agoI do not think solar is going to work. As you say, it might take up to 50 years to crack the case on nuclear fusion. I argue that it might take up to 50 years for governments and companies around the world to even begin cooperating in a fashion such that they make a dent in carbon-based energy sources at the global scale using solar. The reason why solar is not going to work mostly is because there is no legitimate mass installation of batteries that can handle the demand of energy. And the reason why the batteries cannot handle the demand of energy is because governments are not serious about deploying more, and people are already comfortable with the quality of life they already have, so neither are going to step up to make this work. And to be fair, why should the average citizen impose restrictions on themselves to solve this crisis? It's not realistic. Governments are supposed to be the ones to make these initiatives. Analogy: I hate having to pay for taxes, but I like that the government gets it from everyone, so that it can implement common services that benefit a lot of people, which wouldn't be possible otherwise. The only way is nuclear fission because, as you said, it is proven to be safe and reliable. However, the people have spoken: They do not want "dangerous" nuclear reactors around, even if those impressions were formed by reactors designed and built in the 1950s-1960s. I personally think this is a shut case. There is no convincing of the people to go to nuclear fission anymore.
- svara 6y agoIt's a bit odd to me that you seem to deem fusion power realistic, while discounting other ways of generating and storing power that are basically available already. Power from renewables can be stored for the long term as hydrogen. That's well understood technology, scaling up is an engineering problem. When the sun shines and the wind blows, solar and onshore wind are the cheapest ways to make electricity, so there's a huge economic incentive to solving the storage issue.
- usui 6y agoThanks for pointing out, because now that I think of it, my view does come off as odd. What I think it reflects is that despite nuclear fusion being a technical, engineering problem, I believe getting companies/governments to abandon carbon for wind/solar to the point of carbon-neutral is even more insurmountable. Does that viewpoint make sense? For them to get off fossil fuels, it's going to need a ball-out-of-the-park solution. It's too hard to compete with the fracking revolution.
- thechao 6y agoNet-positive was achieved in 2013. As far as I can remember, ITER is a test-bed for economical and scalable nuclear fusion. Also, the corporate world (at least here in Texas, of all places) is perfectly capable of rolling out state-scale renewable power (wind).
- kibwen 6y ago> Net-positive was achieved in 2013. Do you have a source for this? I was also under the impression that fusion has never yet produced a net of energy.
- wtallis 6y agoProbably referring to this highly controversial re-definition of Q: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor#Scientific_breakeven_at_NIF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor#Scie...
- elil17 6y agoIf you define your efficiency metric in a clever way, anything is possible: https://io9.gizmodo.com/breakthrough-the-worlds-first-net-positive-nuclear-fu-1442537401 https://io9.gizmodo.com/breakthrough-the-worlds-first-net-po...
- lambdatronics 6y agoNope. JET achieved Q~0.7 in 1997[1],and that hasn't been beat since. In 1998, JT-60 would have gotten Q~1.2, had they put deuterium-tritium fuel [2] (but it wasn't built for that). You might be thinking of some news from NIF. In 2013, they sorta claimed to have reached ignition, but that was only by moving the goal-posts.[3] ITER is not by any means a test of an economical or scalable reactor -- it's still at the stage of a science experiment. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60 [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#Breakeven_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#Bre...
- cmdli 6y agoI would argue that we are already seriously building more and more solar and wind power, along with research into better battery storage. Even if we solve the current climate crisis with solar and wind, we may still be able to do even better with fusion in 50 years. Fusion would be very energy dense, requiring a lot less resources and land than solar or wind, and has the potential for even cheaper and less environmentally-destructive energy than current renewable resources.
- Reason077 6y ago> "I bet a concerted roll-out of nuclear + solar could cut US emissions due to electricity generation by at least 30% over the next 20 years." 30% over 20 years in unambitious. The UK has cut grid carbon emissions by 60% in the past 10 years. (2010 average: 467g/kWh. 2019 average: 189g/kWh). Emissions continue to decline every year. This was largely achieved by closing coal power plants, and building a lot of wind (both on and off-shore), solar, biomass, and new interconnections with continental Europe. No new nuclear was built in this time. Wind is now the second largest source of electricity in the UK, after natural gas. (But natural gas usage is also declining!)
- stjohnswarts 6y agoJust switching over all new development to nuclear and ignoring the luddites would basically make us guilt free and green, but that won't happen until we're desperate.
- nucpal 6y agoagreed! the CEO of JET (largest working fusion reactor, until ITER is finished) Ian Chapman said in a lecture that renewables (and nuclear fission) are key to holding off climate change until fusion is a more mature technology why should the research be mutually exclusive though? there's resources and brainpower to pursue both.
- scottious 6y agoIt's not an either/or... we should be pursuing lots of different avenues for power generation because we don't know what will pan out and what won't. Fusion might still be a huge win even if it takes 50 more years to perfect.
- mkoubaa 6y agobutter and guns
- iandanforth 6y agoIs Iter aiming for breakeven or net plus energy?
- jansan 6y agoOne objective is a Q value of greater than 10 for a moment. And a steady Q value of 5. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Objectives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Objectives
- The_rationalist 6y agoMaintain a fusion pulse for up to 8 minutes What does this mean?
- jansan 6y agoI am not a physicist, but AFAIK the problem is to maintain the plasma in a steady state. This could mean that they will try to keep the plasma stable for 8 minutes until it collapses.
- petschge 6y agoThe characteristic frequencies in the plasma are much higher. Kilohertz and up. The steady state will be reached within seconds, so to the plasma 8 minutes is basically "infinity". But at that point the all the power that is leaking out of the plasma (50MW of heating times a Q of 10 implies that the plasma will output half a GW) will have heated the wall to the limit (and that is with active cooling of the walls). One could beef up the cooling to run at actual steady state (for an hour, or a day or a year), but it would not tell you much extra, so they didn't bother.
- willis936 6y agoTokamaks need a changing current in the central solenoid. So while 8 minutes is infinity for a stellarator, there are important performance benchmarks at 8 seconds, 8 minutes, 8 hours, etc. You trade pulse length for ohmic heating.
- StanAngeloff 6y agoSome years ago, likely around 2010, I had the priviledge to visit Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (it was called UKAEA Culham back then). During my visit, we were shown around various experiments and after a long evening, we had the opportunity to attend a Q&A with the staff. The question everyone wanted to know the answer to was When will it be ready? The scientists and everyone else involved honestly thought 10 years would be more than enough time for the technology to mature and find its way into everyday lives. Commercial fusion energry, always 5-10 years away.
- AQuantized 6y agoAbout 15 years ago my physics professor told me fusion would always be 20 years away, so at least we're getting progressively shorter times away.
- ajakate 6y agoReminds me a little of this xkcd on the James Webb delays: https://xkcd.com/2014/ https://xkcd.com/2014/
- kzrdude 6y agoPeople underestimate time. I'll do something very HN and compare with software. When did Git get really good? Finished, mainstream? It took a good ten years for it to be really established. And that's just for a simple hack of an idea, that needed this time to be fleshed out.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Corazoor 6y agoWell, they were not exactly wrong. Humanity as a collective would have been able to push the technology to a usable level in that timeframe, the knowledge for that was certainly there. But it would have required spending quite a lot more money on it. The incentives for that were simply not there, and that remains still true today. With the current level of investment and committment, it's more like 40-50 years for the first real generator, and another 10-20 until the first commercial one.
- usui 6y agoI am going to need some help on this one as my knowledge on physics is limited: What makes scientists believe that the solution to nuclear fusion power is only a matter of scale? I desperately want nuclear fusion to work because nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone. It's also 500% more important that nuclear fusion works because most people around the world think that nuclear fission is scary (weaponization concerns even though fission power is different from bomb-making, radioactive waste, reactor meltdowns, etc.), even though it's the only realistic method we have today of going carbon-neutral. However, I looked up the article on "fusion power" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power) and it says "but to date, no design has produced more fusion power output than the electrical power input, defeating the purpose." Can anyone help explain what I am missing, or what is not explained well? My common-person impression is if a laboratory experiment cannot even produce desired outcomes, what makes people think that an engineered, faulty-prone system will? The way I see it is that researchers produce the proof-of-concept, and engineering will attempt to reproduce that at scale. Isn't this preemptive? Or, from the article, it seems that it is necessary to build this thing in order to get any conclusive research results.
- soperj 6y agoThis is a lab experiment, just a huge one.
- d_silin 6y agoScaling factor in fusion is pretty well understood science. Last JET tokamak was the experiment that confirmed this part. Fusion science has evolved to the point where it is necessary to bring the fusion engineering on the same level.
- petschge 6y agoThe simple answer is that the surface only goes up a factor of 4 if you increase the radius by a factor of 2, but the volume goes up by a factor of 8. So the ratio of (energy containing) volume to surface (where energy get's lost) if getting better with increasing size. There is of course much more complicated answers, all the way up to full-device simulations using gyrokinetic codes like Gene or Gkeyll that take millions of core hours and predict that ITER will work (and that predict performance of existing devices correctly).
- aey 6y agoP != NP will be proven before we have a breakeven fusion.
- mbgerring 6y ago> The facility could see plasma generated in the machine - a notional start to operations - shortly after the assembly phase ends in 2025. So you're saying it's... 5 years away?
- qwertox 6y agoThe generation of plasma is approximately 5 years away. Around 2035 the first experiments with tritium will me made, at least that's the expectation. And even then ITER isn't designed to be a usable reactor, it's just a prototype. They intend to build a real one afterwards, and even that one will be a demonstration reactor.
- Normille 6y agoWith all this talk of the colossal ITER project merely being a warm-up for the even bigger DEMO one to follow which, in its turn will be but a pre-cursor to the real thing, I can't help being reminded of Douglas Adams's 'Deep Thought' “There is no problem,” said Deep Thought with magnificent ringing tones. “I am simply the second greatest computer in the Universe of Space and Time.” “But the second?” insisted Lunkwill. “Why do you keep saying the second? You’re surely not thinking of the Multicorticoid Perspicutron Titan Muller are you? Or the Pondermatic? Or the . . .” Contemptuous lights flashed across the computer’s console. “I spare not a single unit of thought on these cybernetic simpletons!” he boomed. “I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me!” Fook was losing patience. He pushed his notebook aside and muttered, “I think this is getting needlessly messianic.” “You know nothing of future time,” pronounced Deep Thought, “and yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it will be my fate eventually to design.”
- gclawes 6y agoAt this point I've got a lot more hope in the MIT/Commonwealth Fusion Systems approach with REBCO magnets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk At this point it looks like ITER is hampered by it's relatively old supeconductor technology (ultra low temp/moderate field strength traditional magnets vs high temp/high field REBCO magnets).
- sam 6y agoITER and Commonwealth can (and in my opinion should) be seen as complimentary endeavors. ITER has been designed with relatively conservative magnet technology and will very likely provide the physics results that need to be understood in order for fusion power to become a reality. This includes experimental tests of the physics of plasmas where the heating is dominated by high energy alpha particles rather than external heating. This is a regime that's not yet been studied in a laboratory and there is important research to be done there. Commonwealth is pushing the envelope of high temperature superconductor magnet technology and is relatively high risk compared to ITER's magnets (and this is a good thing). Lots of ITER technology will be useful to Commonwealth even before ITER turns on. For example decisions about which low activation steels and the huge amount of physics work that's already gone into planning for ITER. I think the most likely outcome is that both accomplish their goals and contribute to making commercially viable fusion energy a reality in the future.
- Mvandenbergh 6y agoLuckily, since ITER and SPARC are being built with the same aspect ratio, all the learning about plasma control, materials, cooling, tritium, remote handling, etc. is fully transferable. The tritium extraction and processing is a whole separate multi-story building full of first-of-a-kind equipment which will be 1:1 transferable to any breeding fusion reactor. The work that ITER and IFMIF will be doing on material lifetime and handling under heavy neutron bombardment - a really substantial engineering problem - will be fully transferable. The work on first-wall material which has to handle the neutron flux, very high thermal loads, and not poison the plasma when traces of it come off is also fully transferable. Basically everything that's really new about ITER except for the size will work the same way on an HTS based machine. I'd say about 2/3 for the science done at ITER would need to be done for any D-T fusion device, another 1/6 applies to all similarly configured tokamaks (i.e. it's less less relevant for stellarators or spherical tokamaks), and 1/6 is ITER specific (high estimate TBH). If things run according to schedule (obviously questionable) then in 2025/2026 ITER will have first plasma and CFS will be on schedule to start building SPARC. CFS is being very clever in doing all their magnet design work first - investors are funding it because even if they don't get either SPARC or ARC funded and built, they will at least have some very useful IP on large HTS magnets which is bound to be worth something.
- throwawaysea 6y agoITER won't be commercially viable. After ITER comes DEMO, which is itself a decades-long project. DEMO won't demonstrate electricity generation until 2048: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station#Ti... In my mind, that means we need to see deployment of Gen 4 fission reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor) commercially, to bridge the gaps between a decline in coal-fired plants and the potential of renewables.
- VyperCard 6y agoThey take too long to build
- pfdietz 6y agoThere probably has to be a machine before DEMO to solidify the engineering and materials. Also, after ITER, there will not be enough tritium to do another large machine (the tritium comes from heavy water reactors, but those have lost in the market and will be shutting down in the next couple of decades.) So a machine to just make tritium may be needed.
- OptionX 6y agoSorry I'm a layman at best on the subject, buts whats the difference between this project and, for example, W7-X?
- ejolto 6y agoW7-X is a stellarator [1], and ITER is a tokamak [2]. They are two different approaches to achieve controlled nuclear fusion. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak
- tawm 6y agoW7-X is strictly for experimenting on plasmas, it's not supposed to break even on energy output, ever
- petschge 6y agoTo get fusion there is a couple of ways: There is gravitational confinement (that is how stars do it, but it is impractically large for humans), there is inertial confinement (get enough energy out before it explodes, but that only works for hydrogen bombs and NIF, not for a reactor) and magnetic confinement (that is what we intend to use for reactors). Magnetic confinement works because a plasma consists of charged particles that gyrate around the magnetic field lines. So (to first order) they can not escape across field lines. But they can move along the field lines and hit the end of the device. The particles move fast, so simply making a linear device long enough is hard. So the next idea was to bend the magnetic field into a torus (the shape of a donut), because that way there is no end to the magnetic field lines. Unfortunately that configuration is unstable, the plasma donut will bend and twist until it hits a wall, stops being a plasma and falls to the ground. There is basically three option out of this problem: 1.) Tokamaks [1] such as ITER. Here we induce an additional current inside the plasma that goes around the hole of the donut. That produces a small additional field that stabilized the current. But driving that current can be hard (using what is called a plasma transformer work only for a limited times, but AFAIK that is not the first limit on a discharge that ITER will hit, wall heating limits single plasma "shots" to shorter times anyway). The upside is that the design is rather simple, which implies you don't need millions of core hours to design and the fields coils are reasonably easy to produce. 2.) Stellarators [2] such as W7-X. Here the field coils that produce the field lines in the donut are intentionally twisted to produce a more complicated magnetic field. The upside is that we do not need the current in the plasma and get better performance (for a device of similar size), but the design of the field coils is hard (impossible back in the 60ies and still really hard even with modern computers) and the production of the coil is not simple either. You can actually include "producability" as an optimization goal along with plasma performance in your design code, but even then you will have to build a large number of different coil designs. 3.) Active control. It takes some time for the plasma donut to bend and twist. Typically a few milliseconds. So if you stick a large number of sensors and computer controlled coils around the plasma you might be able to continuously keep the plasma confined, just like balancing a pencil on its tip. This was of course utterly unimaginable back in the 60ies, and even today there is mayor problems. Sensors aren't fast enough, optimal (or even good) control algorithms are unknown and rapidly ramping megaamperes in the control coils is hard if you don't want to rip them out of the device accidentally. And you probably only have ~ 10 failed attempts before the wall of the vacuum device is compromised and you need a new device. Consequently there is some small scale research on that (sorry I don't have a cool link handy), but nobody is trying that on large devices for now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator
- kristianp 6y ago18b doesn't seem like a huge amount of money these days with the economic stimulus funds being announced around covid-19.
- bjackman 6y agoFor some reason I often think about things like this in terms of NHS budgets. 18bn is, very roughly, 2 years of healthcare for London.
- eximius 6y agoIt is hard for me to conceive of the steps required in these projects that add up to years - just in assembly. Is it due to precision requirements being difficult to achieve? Supply chain delays for custom parts? Lots of experimental runs that require dis-assembly and tuning?
- foxrider 6y agoMaking complicates shapes these sizes is very very hard. And the fact that it's a one-off project for now makes it so much more expensive and hard. From my understanding somewhere some factory would have to dedicate a whole production line just to this one device.
- mhh__ 6y agoThere is no supply chain for a lot of the parts in these projects. Even for a board that doesn't require a custom chip (You can buy some ridiculous high-spec chips off the shelf these days), the silicon will be expensive, the PCB will have to be made to a very high tolerance etc. To top it all off you may require engineers who are not only experts in their own field but also require some in depth knowledge of aspects of theoretical physics (i.e. If you are looking for new particles your usual rules of thumb may not work) which for the most part engineers don't go anywhere near in their normal education. On top of all the custom hardware you have to be able to set up the infrastructure to use your shiny new hardware, places for staff to work and then land to put it all on (And this is on top of the cost of actually building the main experiment). In short, everything involved in experimental science is expensive.
- the8472 6y agoOne part of it is that it's a research project. The other part is the bureaucracy of international cooperation and the pieces being built all over the world according to a huge centrally managed specification. It's not like SpaceX that starts with a small design and then builds incrementally larger versions to have something to show in the meantime. It's from 0 to finished product.
- pezezin 6y ago
- erik_landerholm 6y agoFrom Here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p6jrlbUOuuOCHnhR9fcsvnQJl4dJeKPF/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p6jrlbUOuuOCHnhR9fcsvnQJl4d... "Most of the power (~100 MW on ITER) released in SOL flows in an extremely narrow channel ~1 mm" wow
- lambdatronics 6y agoYeah, steady-state heat fluxes comparable to re-entry are expected.
- tus88 6y agoFinally! I have been following this for over 20 years and thought it would never happen.
- jeffbee 6y agoAnd you were probably right!
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoIs there a good single compendium of ongoing fusion projects?
- sam 6y agoYes, check out https://www.fusionenergybase.com/ https://www.fusionenergybase.com/ which I've put together. List of organizations are here, https://www.fusionenergybase.com/organizations https://www.fusionenergybase.com/organizations and individual projects are here, https://www.fusionenergybase.com/projects https://www.fusionenergybase.com/projects
- williesleg 6y agoLet's get a ton of foreign invaders imported into France then make an artificial sun. Can't wait to see how this goes.
- thinkloop 6y agoFusion + AI = no more human labor
- Semiapies 6y agoAnd always perpetually 20 years away.
- adventured 6y agoHarnessing the perpetual motion required for it to always be 20 years away, is the key to fusion being able to generate infinite energy at a low cost. It's the most challenging aspect.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago8 light minutes actually.
- somepeepz15 6y agoThat's really neat! somepeepz15@gmail.com
- somepeepz15 6y agoThat's really neat! somepeepz15@gmail.com
- yalogin 6y agoI thought Lawrence Livermore laboratory does some cutting edge experiments on fusion and I read articles about how they are hoping to get some breakthrough. Is this new thing supposed to actually help take the tech forward or achieve something we havent achieved so far?
- l0b0 6y agoFrom the about page[1]: > […] prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy […] [1] https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines
- pfdietz 6y agoLooking at stories like this, you need to realize how far out of the running this technology is. The power density of ITER (gross fusion power of the reactor divided by the volume of the reactor, not just the volume of the plasma) is 50 kW/m^3. This is horribly low, about 1/400th the power density of a PWR reactor vessel. The power/$ is also horribly bad. The cost is going to have to come down by two orders of magnitude to start being competitive. Fusion is an example of sunk cost thinking. The only reason we're working on it is because we had been. A clean sheet energy strategy would put very little resources into fusion.
- willis936 6y agoYou don’t speak for the people working on it, so your claim of sunk cost fallacy is null.
- pfdietz 6y agoI am allowed to form my own opinion from the evidence we have. The evidence is that fusion is a huge boondoggle that is extremely unlikely to deliver anything useful. Asking people working in a field if it's promising is silly, since they are a biased sample. If they didn't think it was promising, they likely wouldn't be working in the field.
- willis936 6y agoIndeed you are allowed to come to your own conclusions. I object to this statement. >Fusion is an example of sunk cost thinking. The only reason we're working on it is because we had been. This is putting forward the opinions of others. The premise is the people who stay in the field lacked some form of awareness of your arguments. They are aware and they disagree. You can’t assume your argument is accepted in the argument.
- pfdietz 6y agoNo, I'm sure the people in the field are, at some level, well aware of the arguments. They're not new, after all -- look at Lidsky from 1983. But the human power of rationalization is very powerful when your career depends on it. They get a comforting assurance that the argument was wrong, and they don't look too closely to see if the refutation was actually correct. What did Upton Sinclair say? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- zionpi 6y ago“We hope to see first plasma in five years. That will only be a short plasma - lasting a few milliseconds” this is a quote from original article.I was wondering why `few milliseconds` can make such a huge impact?What does this `few milliseconds` plasma mean?
- lambdatronics 6y agoYou gotta start somewhere! The plasma discharges will eventually last several minutes, but they will 'exercise' the machine very carefully/gradually over the course of a few years to be sure that nothing breaks.
- willis936 6y agoIn MCF machines plasmas are made by heating gas through RF (gyrotrons) or momentum (NBI). Both gyrotrons and NBI are very expensive, complicated, high power machines with big subsystems that go into them. Bringing on all of the heaters and diagnostics take time. Wall conditioning takes time. The first plasma is before most of the necessary systems are up. It’s a demonstration that the machine is built.
- pl-94 6y agoCan someone explain to me the advantages of fusion over fission? Except for the radioactive wastes and the enthusiasm of journalists I don't get it
- nucpal 6y agoIt's mainly the waste. Nuclear fission is a stable source of energy that does not produce carbon emissions in production. It's pretty much the answer to the climate crisis except that it produces dangerous waste that is horrendous to store and manage. Fusion mainly avoids this :)
- pfdietz 6y agoFusion has been touted as avoiding waste and fuel availability problems of fission. But the main problem of fission is that it's too damned expensive, with very large capital cost. Fusion makes this main problem worse, not better.
- lambdatronics 6y agoAlso, the accident scenarios are not as bad -- there's less total radioactivity in the device, and there's no meltdown risk.
- pfdietz 6y agoIf you had a fission reactor with a power density as low as a fusion reactor, it would be incredibly safe also. All that thermal inertia, accidents would go in extreme slow motion. You might ask why fission reactors aren't designed that way.
- lambdatronics 6y agoInteresting question. NuScale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power) reactor appears to have a very low power density around 1.5 MW/m^3, by my estimate (2.7m dia, 20m tall, 60MWe -> 180MWth). They still rely on having coolant (water) present in the reactor to avoid a meltdown, although it should circulate automatically by boiling & condensing. The trick is that something like 10% of a fission reactor's thermal output continues for many hours due to decay heat, whereas with a fusion reactor that can be orders of magnitude less, with appropriate material choices.
- antpls 6y agoTo have a sense of scale, it would be super cool if someone could make a photo montage with some aerial pictures from https://www.iter.org/album/Media/4%20-%20Aerial https://www.iter.org/album/Media/4%20-%20Aerial and some other big known structures. Maybe one of the Tesla Giga factory on top of the same picture (correctly scaled of course) ?
- lambdatronics 6y agoI have such mixed feelings about ITER. I hope we learn the things we want to from it, and that what we learn is good news. But ITER is very far from being a demonstration of a practical power plant -- it's a science experiment first and foremost. (Well, it has really been an experiment in international government cooperation...) I'm concerned that fusion research could have an 'AI winter' if there are any problems with ITER. (Similar to what has happened to inertial fusion in the failure of NIF to achieve ignition.) On the bright side, I think Commonwealth's SPARC experiment has a chance of beating ITER to hit 'scientific' break-even (Q>1) -- although ITER should top out around Q=10-20, where SPARC is aiming for Q~4. (Q~20 is needed for a power plant.) The issue of 'disruptions' (rapid unscheduled disassembly of the plasma) has not been solved. ITER's construction was premised on the idea that we need it to be solved, so therefore it will get solved. The situation is very similar to that of self-driving cars -- avoiding 90% of disruptions seems pretty doable, but a percent or so happen without warning.(https://fusion4freedom.com/pdfs/Disruption-Risk-poster-Wurden-LAUR.pdf https://fusion4freedom.com/pdfs/Disruption-Risk-poster-Wurde...) I hope that people don't get the wrong idea about fusion from ITER. Fusion reactors don't scale down well, but they also don't have to be quite as large, slow, and expensive as ITER. Tokamaks only use about 10% of the available magnetic field pressure, which means about 100x less power density than is theoretically possible, for a given magnetic field strength. Also, ITER is limited by its superconductors to about 5T. REBCO superconductors could potentially triple that, which would increase power density 81 times. So, there is a ton of headroom to improve performance -- dealing with the outflux of power becomes the major issue, actually. Ultimately, fusion is a long way from market still. It's hard to innovate rapidly with devices that cost billions and have life-cycles of decades. Private enterprises are pushing down on those numbers, though -- that's where I'm pinning my hopes. Given that renewables are approaching grid parity, it looks like the goalposts will start receding before fusion even achieves net power production.
- LockAndLol 6y agoSo many fusion sceptics in the comments that it sounds like a congregation of anti-vaxxers. Funding for fusion has been ridiculously low for decades and it's exactly because of sceptics with myopathy like the ones present here. Countries could've been pumping trillions into fusion and other clean energy, together, for years, but we'd rather vote for politicians willing to bomb the oil out of a poorer nation than think more than a decade or more ahead. Now that climate change is finally becoming more of a reality, the myopathic sceptics are turning into temporal sceptics "but we won't have enough time". People like them create the issues we have and every time a solution is proposed, they'll cast doubt. I'm glad things are moving along at all. I say stop oil, petrol, gas subsidies in every country, and get out of countries you all shouldn't be sticking your noses in. Invest in something that will actually let your grandchildren inhabit a planet with less friction and a much smaller threat to their way of life (climate change, overfishing, plastic pollution, etc.). Stop being so selfish.
- pfdietz 6y agoThe equation of fusion skeptics to anti-vaxxers is an unacceptable slur. We have excellent and incontrovertible evidence of the efficacy and value of vaccines. We have no evidence that fusion can be made practical, and there are well understood arguments for why it will not be. Fusion is more like the Emperor's New Energy Source, an exercise in groupthink and sunk costing.
- ratdragon 6y agoWhat does HN crowd think of companies like hb11 or lppfusion which try to construct much smaller but still powerful (lpp plans for 5MW, relatively small, reactor. They also want to use a different fuel that produces very little neutrons, thus very low radiocativity. And moreover they do not need thermal part as electricity is generated by directly collecting alpha particles (and some Xrays IIRC). It _feels_ to me like ITER is inheritance from old times - trying to build the reactor the way we always did (i.e. thermal; and also using the "easiest" to ignite fuel - but that produces a lot of radiocativity compared to hB11 fuel). As someone pointed out here in comments, there are already better magnets than those used in ITER even now. Don't get me wrong, it would be sooo cool if ITER succeeded and started fusion energy generation, but it is just taking too long. https://www.hb11.energy/our-story https://lppfusion.com/technology/fusion-energy-generator/
- Koffiepoeder 6y agoSomeone below mentioned the following link, in which they do a sharp comparison of fusion technologies. I am by no means an expert, but after watching that link, it appears to me that such solutions are probably unproven science: it took over 50 years to get anywhere near a Q-factor of 1 (energy in = energy out), with hundreds of technologies screened, tested and scrapped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk
- fluffything 6y agoI worked on Gene - a gyrokinetics app used to study fusion reactors - and I fondly recall helping a colleague debug one of their simulations in which they set a boundary condition incorrectly; that simulation ran for two weeks before the mistake was found. We estimated this mistake to have costed the tax-payer multiple millions of dollars _in electricity costs_ (just from the core's that were used, their wattage, and the time duration; which is a fraction of the cost of acquiring and operating a super-computer). All our fusion models that correctly predict all the results produced by all the fusion reactors that have been built to date predict that ITER will work. I have no idea whether these models predict that these other reactor designs will also work. What I do know is that one needs _many_ simulations to study that, and the costs of doing that feels absurdly out-of-reach for any startup. One does not only need to "verify" a design, but come up with it, optimize it, etc. as well as gaining access to the supercomputing resources or buying and maintaining their own supercomputer. That puts the initial investment already in the millions. OTOH, a startup that checks a design that has been created, optimized, and verified in academia and whose goal is "only" to build it, would require a smaller investment, but no idea how big this investment ought to be.
- blargmaster33 6y ago"ITER will not produce sufficient power for net electrical production. Instead, the emitted heat will be vented" - Wikipedia What a fucking waste
- irthomasthomas 6y agoI'm surprised that we're still chasing moon shots in strong force fusion, while weak fusion, which has actually been demonstrated already, gets little attention. Chemically assisted/low energy nuclear reactions have been proven to produce clean energy and useful transmutation. This process can be used to turn radioactive waste into inert material. For example, technetium-99 is a particularly pernicious by-product of nuclear fission. It has a half-life of ~200,000 years and is very mobile in the atmosphere, making it difficult and expensive to handle. In a CANR reactor, this nuclear waste is converted into the safe, and valuable, palladium-106, and the by-product is clean heat. Given the double benefit of clean fuel and nuclear waste recycling, I think this should be a bigger priority than strong-force fusion. http://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/einsteins-lost-hypothesis http://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/einsteins-lost-hypothesis https://www.jstor.org/stable/24216601?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24216601?seq=1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128159446000130 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012815...
- karxxm 6y agoSo you suggest that they should dump nearly 2 decades of work because there is something else which seems to be a potential energy source? The ITER project was founded in 2007. From there on hundreds of physicist, chemists, engineers and computer scientists started planning this RESEARCH project in order to better understand this kind of technology. Shouldn't we stick to what we have started (since this is (more than) cutting edge technology) and have a look at other technologies in parallel?
- undreren 6y ago> So you suggest that they should dump nearly 2 decades of work because there is something else which seems to be a potential energy source? OP said nothing of the sort. They said that they didn't understand the prioritization of funding given an alternative that they found personally much much more valuable.
- karxxm 6y agoI am pretty sure that this project is not prioritized in any way. It's a research project with funding from all over the world. It should be compared to the CERN project where scientists from all over the world try to understand science behind it better. One could argue that CERN is a waist of money since there are other fields of study in physics which seem to have more potential. We should be happy that states from all over the world are willing to pay for a research project, which does not have a direct "value" for the next couple decades. There will never be a private investor for this scope of project since there is no monetizable value behind it yet and maybe in the next 50 years.
- rini17 6y agoThe elephant in the room: fusion is no better wrt radioactive waste than fission. ITER is projected to end up with 30000 tons of radioactive waste. https://thebulletin.org/2018/02/iter-is-a-showcase-for-the-drawbacks-of-fusion-energy/ https://thebulletin.org/2018/02/iter-is-a-showcase-for-the-d... "Surrounding the ITER tokamak, a monstrous concrete cylinder 3.5 meters thick, 30 meters in diameter and 30 meters tall called the bioshield will prevent X-rays, gamma rays and stray neutrons from reaching the outside world. "
- nucpal 6y agoThat article is quite outdated, JET has 2020 D-T campaign. More importantly, fusion is a thousand times better than fission with respect to waste. No one is claiming there is no waste at all, but tritium has a half-life of 12.5 years so most of the waste will be safe within a few decades. The rest will largely be neutron embrittled steels/materials (classified as low level nuclear waste) that is easily stored. Compare and contrast that to nuclear fission which generates high level waste, spent nuclear fuel rods and radioactive liquid which must be painstakingly petrified and processed before safe storage. Even then this waste will still be dangerous for over 100,000 years.
- rini17 6y agoSo the waste output/power output is 1000 times better? Any sources pls? And this "Neutron embrittlement" does not create any dangerous long-lived isotopes? Like, we just wait few years and then normally landfill the concrete or how should I imagine the process?
- pfdietz 6y agoFusion creates much less long term radioactivity. However, the mass of material contaminated with radioactivity is very high, since the radioactivity that is created is not concentrated in fuel elements, as it is in a fission reactor.
- nucpal 6y agoFission creates neutron embrittled materials and steels as well. And yes we tend to store them until they can be safely disposed. Again, the main difference is the fuel. Tritium is safe in a few decades, spent uranium is safe in a few hundred thousand years.
- saberience 6y agoDumb question here, but how is the actual power transmitted to the grid? I get we are trying to have some sustained reaction with plasma inside a magnetic field... but that just makes heat, not electricity. Other reactor types have water to heat up and make steam but where does this happen in a Fusion reactor? It seems as though there is no obvious "place" for there to be water to turn into steam. Again, sorry for dumb question.
- nucpal 6y agoIt's not a dumb question. The answer is kinda dumb though, most working fusion reactors don't have a way to extract heat yet. But the plan is to use the same turbine (heat water into steam) technology from fission reactors. So you have cutting edge plasma physics in one part of the reactor and old school victorian-era steam turbines in the other.
- imtringued 6y agoSo it all boils down to boiling water?
- tiborsaas 6y agoYes, it's just a mindbogglingly complex and advanced steam engine :)
- 0xffff2 6y agoWe really only have a few ways to generate electricity: - PV solar generates electricity more or less directly - Wind turbines use mechanical energy from the wind to spin a turbine - Hydro converts potential energy to kinetic energy to spin a turbine - Nearly every other form of generation in existence heats water to create steam and uses that steam to spin a turbine.
- yohannparis 6y agoTo be fair, todays steam engine are marvel of efficiency and reliability and water-cooling is a perfected science. Almost nothing is has easy to manage and powerful as steam.
- ragebol 6y agoWhat downsides are there to fusion power, assuming it's commercially viable in a couple of decades? What negative externalities are there that could make it prohibitive? Fossil fuel has pollution etc, solar takes up lots of space and is apparently also ugly, wind energy is ugly and makes noise (according to NIMBYs). What argument could a NIMBY person have against fusion power, besides the big building in their back yard?
- Tepix 6y agoCan't be miniaturized, thus expensive. Not mobile.
- swebs 6y agoAny large power plant is pretty much a missile target if war breaks out, I guess.
- lambdatronics 6y agoRadioactive leaks/accidents -- they will be orders of magnitude less of a problem than fission, in the worst case, but people are innumerate, so they'll still object.
- Jenz 6y agoThose magnets are huge. I wonder if, though possibly solving the problem of clean energy, it will also create other problems, say, something like "geomagnetic field pollution".
- wiz21c 6y agoFTA : "Iter is a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. All members share in the cost of construction." Who contributes how much ? Because at face value this sounds like real international (that is, beyond little war games) cooperation. Sort of "mankind" project.
- swebs 6y ago>Europe [The member countries of the EU, not the entire continent] is responsible for the largest portion of construction costs (45.6 percent); the remainder is shared equally by China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the US (9.1 percent each). The Members contribute very little monetary contribution to the project: instead, nine-tenths of contributions will be delivered to the ITER Organization in the form of completed components, systems or buildings. In this way, the scientific and industrial fabric in each Member is prepared for the step after ITER—the conception and realization of the type of prototype fusion reactor that will demonstrate industrial-scale fusion electricity within this half of the century. For all Members, the potential benefits of participation are significant: by contributing a portion of the project's costs, Members benefit from 100 percent of the scientific results and all generated intellectual property. https://www.iter.org/proj/Countries https://www.iter.org/proj/Countries
- transfire 6y agoITER is nothing more than a money sink to underfund innovative research in fusion power. Big Oil ️ ITER.