5 ms·

Honestly, ITER is so bad that you're insulting the Shuttle with this comparison. Shuttle was super inefficient, but it actually launched stuff. Military, commer

Honestly, ITER is so bad that you're insulting the Shuttle with this comparison. Shuttle was super inefficient, but it actually launched stuff. Military, commercial, and scientific satellites. And only like a decade after the program was started, too. ITER started in 1985, won't achieve first plasma until 2025 at earliest, and they won't even start D-T fusion experiments until 2035. That's a full half a century until the START of real fusion experiments, and it could still slip. It won't even produce any electrical power. Any thermal energy produced will be vented. Shuttle is a shining example of efficiency, competence, pragmatism, and execution in comparison.

pier25 6y ago
I know nothing about physics but I was under the impression ITER was our best shot for clean sustainable energy. I'm not saying you're wrong btw, just that I had high hopes.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Neither ITER, nor fusion in general, are our best shots for clean sustainable energy. They are at best very long shots, and at worst complete wastes of effort.
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    What's your option? If you say solar or wind, I'll tell you not without solid state physics experiments to multiply battery capacity by at least 10x. (Not impossible, but as much pie in the sky as fusion.) Or a global electric network. Or space solar with concomitant energy sending infrastructure. Nuclear is good for maybe 300 years. (And not exclusive with other sources.) Hydro, geothermal are nice where we can have them. Anything else, we don't even know where to start.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Solar and wind. Your comment about batteries is bizarre. Batteries don't need higher capacity for stationary storage, they need to be cheap. That is not "pie in the sky" and is certainly a much easier engineering problem than fusion. And batteries are not what you'd use for long term storage; that would be hydrogen (which can be stored underground for less than the equivalent of $1/kWh of storage capacity.) Given reasonable projections of where renewables, batteries, and electrolysers will be in 10 years, one will be able to synthesize artificial baseload sources at a lower cost than nuclear fission, anywhere in the world (in some places much less). And fusion will have a very hard time being competitive even with fission.
      - N1H1L 6y ago
        Yes. Also for grid- level storage space and weight are not at a premium - so cheap, comparatively in efficient solutions like sodium-ion batteries or redox flow systems is where the field is moving to.
        AstralStorm 6y ago
        These are really expensive on a scale needed for powering current world with solar and there's nothing to suggest we'll stop there. I'm not sure you understand the scale involved. We're talking billions tons sodium. Millions tons aluminum and steel. Hence the 10x.
        pfdietz 6y ago
        Let's see... producing 1 kg of sodium metal uses about 10 kWh of electrical energy. 1 TWh would produce 100,000 tonnes of sodium. A billion tonnes of sodium would involve 10,000 TWh. World primary energy consumption is below 20 TW, so you're proposing batteries capable of storing hundreds of hours of world energy demand. This is a gross overestimate -- batteries would be used diurnal leveling, with perhaps 12 hours of storage needed, and that just for the grid. Industrial power demand in a renewable world would likely be more dispatchable, and any demand for thermal energy would use bulk thermal storage, not chemical batteries. If you meant sodium compounds, not sodium metal, note that annual world production of sodium chloride is about 200 million tonnes. Oh, and about "millions of tons of aluminum and steel": 2019 world steel production was 1.89 BILLION tonnes. Aluminum production in 2018, 60 million tonnes. The world economy is very large. An energy infrastructure capable of powering that economy will also be large, be it renewable, nuclear, or unicorn power.
    - N1H1L 6y ago
      Why do you need increased storage density for grid level storage?
      - AstralStorm 6y ago
        Because we don't have enough batteries. Lithium as a minable element is too limited to have enough without increased capacity. (If lithium fusion were ever available, we'd run out in 2000 years or so. Batteries take more.) Even redox batteries are, as you need rather pure salts. Even pump storage, cheapest option, would require tons of concrete, which means we'd have serious lime shortage. (Once we run out of natural mountains to use.) Plastics cannot be used as they're either not strong enough or require too much fossil fuels. Any of these problems can be attacked, and they're all about as easy and solvable. Prediction would give about 40 years until that battery capacity is reached. Fusion could be there just as soon. This is not to say we should stop developing renewables, but we need 100% clean power yesterday. Or rather 20 years ago. Currently the only open path is nuclear with enough other renewables (expected 25%-33% is doable depending on location). We're talking gigawatthours of battery capacity installed and running per city. Even if you have everyone an electric car with best available batteries, that would maybe come close. (And the network would have to be heavily as adapted. I've accounted for battery wear and manufacturing with recycling of said batteries.) Top end sodium-sulphur batteries would work too, in equivalent amount. (They do like 250 kWh per bank. Car lithium-ion do ~120 kWh, but you probably want to drive them in the morning.) Mind you the renewables to power them won't materialize overnight either. You get to pay energy and material to make them and modify the grid to adapt to them. Since we're late as all hell, the only way right now is to nuclear. We can decommission it in 50 years easily enough as needed. We had the technology to go full renewable since 80s...
        pfdietz 6y ago
        We don't have enough lithium for DT fusion then, either. If we assume fusion reactors have a wall loading of 1 MW/m^2, and assume 50 cm of LiPb in the blanket, then fusion reactors capable of supply (as heat) 10 TW would need the 6Li from 80 million tonnes of lithium. Current Li reserves are a fraction of this. That ARC reactor design, if extended to world energy demand, would require 100x known beryllium resources.
willis936 6y ago
The shuttle never had funding halted multiple times. Also, ITER is a plasma physics experiment. It is being made to learn about plasma behavior. It isn’t going to fail or somehow not produce useful results before DT or high Q campaigns. A fusion reactor does not fall out of the sky. Was the V2 a failure because all it did was eat up a bunch of money and blow up a bunch of expensive equipment? No. The knowledge costs money. Tangible things are laughably low value by comparison.
- crmd 6y ago
  > The knowledge costs money. Tangible things are laughably low value by comparison. I imagine Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters saying this to the Columbia dean as their lab is being disassembled and they are being fired.
  - willis936 6y ago
    Consider the difference in value between a fish and the knowledge of fishing. Now consider the value of a set of fishing gear to the invention of fishing.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Shuttle was an experiment in reusable launch technology. It was also a reentry science platform. It was a materials science tour de force, pioneering carbon fiber composites, carbon-carbon composites, metal-matrix composites, and high performance aluminum-lithium alloys among other things. ITER is supposed to get break-even. Plasma experiments can better be done at smaller, much cheaper facilities (many of which already exist). ITER, as of 2006, was supposed to be followed almost immediately by DEMO, a power plant capable of producing electricity in 2033. But now ITER is so delayed that it's almost irrelevant. In order to address climate change, we'll have to have transitioned to, say, solar and storage before the 2050s when DEMO might be built, or we'll be stuck with terrible climate consequences. It's just insane how bad it has been. ITER is so badly delayed that it's almost certainly not going to be a key player in fighting climate change.
  - 6y ago
BlueTemplar 6y ago
It pisses me off that despite all the risks they are willing to cut corners in using underpaid foreign workers to pour the concrete...
jnxx 6y ago
> Honestly, ITER is so bad that you're insulting the Shuttle with this comparison. > [ ... ] > It won't even produce any electrical power. Worse. It won't even address the question what could be the so far unknown near magic materials which a breeding blanket would need to be made of. to support sustainable Tritium re-generation, which would be needed a long time before any demonstration could be hoped to produce any electrical power. In short, D-T fusion - the only process which can be imagined to be accessible by magnetic inclusion - needs a supply of Tritium and this needs a working Tritium breeding system, with a neutron loss factor below 1. It is completely unknown how to achieve that.

pier25 6y ago

I know nothing about physics but I was under the impression ITER was our best shot for clean sustainable energy. I'm not saying you're wrong btw, just that I had high hopes.

pfdietz 6y ago
Neither ITER, nor fusion in general, are our best shots for clean sustainable energy. They are at best very long shots, and at worst complete wastes of effort.
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  What's your option? If you say solar or wind, I'll tell you not without solid state physics experiments to multiply battery capacity by at least 10x. (Not impossible, but as much pie in the sky as fusion.) Or a global electric network. Or space solar with concomitant energy sending infrastructure. Nuclear is good for maybe 300 years. (And not exclusive with other sources.) Hydro, geothermal are nice where we can have them. Anything else, we don't even know where to start.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Solar and wind. Your comment about batteries is bizarre. Batteries don't need higher capacity for stationary storage, they need to be cheap. That is not "pie in the sky" and is certainly a much easier engineering problem than fusion. And batteries are not what you'd use for long term storage; that would be hydrogen (which can be stored underground for less than the equivalent of $1/kWh of storage capacity.) Given reasonable projections of where renewables, batteries, and electrolysers will be in 10 years, one will be able to synthesize artificial baseload sources at a lower cost than nuclear fission, anywhere in the world (in some places much less). And fusion will have a very hard time being competitive even with fission.
    - N1H1L 6y ago
      Yes. Also for grid- level storage space and weight are not at a premium - so cheap, comparatively in efficient solutions like sodium-ion batteries or redox flow systems is where the field is moving to.
      - AstralStorm 6y ago
        These are really expensive on a scale needed for powering current world with solar and there's nothing to suggest we'll stop there. I'm not sure you understand the scale involved. We're talking billions tons sodium. Millions tons aluminum and steel. Hence the 10x.
        pfdietz 6y ago
        Let's see... producing 1 kg of sodium metal uses about 10 kWh of electrical energy. 1 TWh would produce 100,000 tonnes of sodium. A billion tonnes of sodium would involve 10,000 TWh. World primary energy consumption is below 20 TW, so you're proposing batteries capable of storing hundreds of hours of world energy demand. This is a gross overestimate -- batteries would be used diurnal leveling, with perhaps 12 hours of storage needed, and that just for the grid. Industrial power demand in a renewable world would likely be more dispatchable, and any demand for thermal energy would use bulk thermal storage, not chemical batteries. If you meant sodium compounds, not sodium metal, note that annual world production of sodium chloride is about 200 million tonnes. Oh, and about "millions of tons of aluminum and steel": 2019 world steel production was 1.89 BILLION tonnes. Aluminum production in 2018, 60 million tonnes. The world economy is very large. An energy infrastructure capable of powering that economy will also be large, be it renewable, nuclear, or unicorn power.
  - N1H1L 6y ago
    Why do you need increased storage density for grid level storage?
    - AstralStorm 6y ago
      Because we don't have enough batteries. Lithium as a minable element is too limited to have enough without increased capacity. (If lithium fusion were ever available, we'd run out in 2000 years or so. Batteries take more.) Even redox batteries are, as you need rather pure salts. Even pump storage, cheapest option, would require tons of concrete, which means we'd have serious lime shortage. (Once we run out of natural mountains to use.) Plastics cannot be used as they're either not strong enough or require too much fossil fuels. Any of these problems can be attacked, and they're all about as easy and solvable. Prediction would give about 40 years until that battery capacity is reached. Fusion could be there just as soon. This is not to say we should stop developing renewables, but we need 100% clean power yesterday. Or rather 20 years ago. Currently the only open path is nuclear with enough other renewables (expected 25%-33% is doable depending on location). We're talking gigawatthours of battery capacity installed and running per city. Even if you have everyone an electric car with best available batteries, that would maybe come close. (And the network would have to be heavily as adapted. I've accounted for battery wear and manufacturing with recycling of said batteries.) Top end sodium-sulphur batteries would work too, in equivalent amount. (They do like 250 kWh per bank. Car lithium-ion do ~120 kWh, but you probably want to drive them in the morning.) Mind you the renewables to power them won't materialize overnight either. You get to pay energy and material to make them and modify the grid to adapt to them. Since we're late as all hell, the only way right now is to nuclear. We can decommission it in 50 years easily enough as needed. We had the technology to go full renewable since 80s...
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        We don't have enough lithium for DT fusion then, either. If we assume fusion reactors have a wall loading of 1 MW/m^2, and assume 50 cm of LiPb in the blanket, then fusion reactors capable of supply (as heat) 10 TW would need the 6Li from 80 million tonnes of lithium. Current Li reserves are a fraction of this. That ARC reactor design, if extended to world energy demand, would require 100x known beryllium resources.

willis936 6y ago

The shuttle never had funding halted multiple times. Also, ITER is a plasma physics experiment. It is being made to learn about plasma behavior. It isn’t going to fail or somehow not produce useful results before DT or high Q campaigns. A fusion reactor does not fall out of the sky. Was the V2 a failure because all it did was eat up a bunch of money and blow up a bunch of expensive equipment? No. The knowledge costs money. Tangible things are laughably low value by comparison.

crmd 6y ago
> The knowledge costs money. Tangible things are laughably low value by comparison. I imagine Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters saying this to the Columbia dean as their lab is being disassembled and they are being fired.
- willis936 6y ago
  Consider the difference in value between a fish and the knowledge of fishing. Now consider the value of a set of fishing gear to the invention of fishing.
Robotbeat 6y ago
Shuttle was an experiment in reusable launch technology. It was also a reentry science platform. It was a materials science tour de force, pioneering carbon fiber composites, carbon-carbon composites, metal-matrix composites, and high performance aluminum-lithium alloys among other things. ITER is supposed to get break-even. Plasma experiments can better be done at smaller, much cheaper facilities (many of which already exist). ITER, as of 2006, was supposed to be followed almost immediately by DEMO, a power plant capable of producing electricity in 2033. But now ITER is so delayed that it's almost irrelevant. In order to address climate change, we'll have to have transitioned to, say, solar and storage before the 2050s when DEMO might be built, or we'll be stuck with terrible climate consequences. It's just insane how bad it has been. ITER is so badly delayed that it's almost certainly not going to be a key player in fighting climate change.
- 6y ago

BlueTemplar 6y ago

It pisses me off that despite all the risks they are willing to cut corners in using underpaid foreign workers to pour the concrete...

jnxx 6y ago

> Honestly, ITER is so bad that you're insulting the Shuttle with this comparison. > [ ... ] > It won't even produce any electrical power. Worse. It won't even address the question what could be the so far unknown near magic materials which a breeding blanket would need to be made of. to support sustainable Tritium re-generation, which would be needed a long time before any demonstration could be hoped to produce any electrical power. In short, D-T fusion - the only process which can be imagined to be accessible by magnetic inclusion - needs a supply of Tritium and this needs a working Tritium breeding system, with a neutron loss factor below 1. It is completely unknown how to achieve that.