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Meanwhile the consortium running ITER [1] is spending €22 billion but the UK is no longer a member because we left the EU. For engineering at this scale, cooper

Meanwhile the consortium running ITER [1] is spending €22 billion but the UK is no longer a member because we left the EU. For engineering at this scale, cooperation is going to get results - not small projects like this.

Retric 6y ago
Those are very different projects with very different goals. ITER is designed conservatively to produce 10x fusion energy output vs electrical energy input. As in you out 1 MW of electricity in and get 1 + 10 = 11MW of heat output. While not designed to be an economic fusion system it would unequivocally demonstrate a working design and a provide a test bed for experiments relating to reactor materials and full scale operations. This however is aimed to explore novel geometries which may aid in future designs. However, the net efficiency at this scale would be vastly lower. It’s still a useful project, but it’s just one of many possible designs.
- raducu 6y ago
  Why would it not be economic? After the first reactor, do we expect building a replica, without all the R&D costs would be significantly more expensive than a standard nuclear reactor? To me, 10x the energy sounds really good.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    10x energy doesnt mean 10x electricity. How one captures that energy and converts it effectively remains an open question. Can all those particles be turned into heat? Will those particles degrade the reactor so fast that it is no longer economically viable?
    - arethuza 6y ago
      ITER seems to be addressing the "capture the energy" part? https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork "The neutrons will be absorbed by the surrounding walls of the tokamak, where their kinetic energy will be transferred to the walls as heat. In ITER, this heat will be captured by cooling water circulating in the vessel walls and eventually dispersed through cooling towers. In the type of fusion power plant envisaged for the second half of this century, the heat will be used to produce steam and—by way of turbines and alternators—electricity."
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        And without breeding blankets, yes you can capture the heat, but you rapidly run out of tritium. ITER will only be operate on DT for a few weeks, total over its lifetime, before the available tritium supply is exhausted (and its materials reach their neutron limits). A "real" reactor will need to have tritium breeding blankets to regenerate the tritium. Otherwise, the cost of tritium alone, if made in fission reactors, for a 1 GW(e) DT fusion reactor would be $15B/year.
        arethuza 6y ago
        Isn't testing that approach of breeding tritium explicitly part of what ITER is trying to do with its TBM programme?
        pfdietz 6y ago
        ITER has a few places where test blanket modules can be installed. ITER will not be able to simulate the neutronic environment of a full reactor (and so will not be able to confirm adequate breeding), nor subject the modules to the cumulative neutron loading they will have to withstand. For this reason, a Fusion Nuclear Science Facility has long been proposed as something that will be needed before DEMO is built. This could be a small, Q < 1 DT fusion device, as the goal would not be plasma physics related. It itself will need to breed its own tritium to operate long enough, so there's a circular dependency in the development.
        njarboe 6y ago
        There are many such technology advances needed for fusion power to work. This is why spending $22 billion on ITER is a very inefficient use of money for research. Maybe as a diplomatic effort of having all the world's major powers [] (China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States) work together it is worth it. Sort of like the space station. Big symbol and cost but little scientific value per dollar. Unfortunately the budget for ITER comes out of the US science budget instead of the State Department. Most US fusion funding only goes to ITER at this point.
  - swebs 6y ago
    Because ITER is not designed to be running for more than a few minutes at a time. Its successor, DEMO, will be designed for continuous power output. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station
- jbms 6y ago
  It's not 10-11MW heat out for 1MW electricity in. It's "500 MW plasma from 50 MW of injected thermal power" which would need 300 MW electrical input. After conversion back to electricity, it might give as much electricity out as is put in! See these links for more: Question asked in the EU parliament: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-000812_EN.html https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-00081... https://news.newenergytimes.net/2020/11/03/open-letter-to-iter-director-general-about-iter-power-claims/ https://news.newenergytimes.net/2020/11/03/open-letter-to-it...
  - Retric 6y ago
    Useful clarification, but I think ITER’s website makes it unambiguous. For 50 MW of injected heating power it will produce 500 MW of fusion power for long pulses of 400 to 600 seconds. https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals. To be more clear, injected heating power excludes the energy required to get to a steady state, as otherwise pulse length needs to be factored in. That said ITER is running a lot of equipment unnecessary for a commercial power plant making engendering Q factors misleading. For example a power plant would not need to collect, process, and store the vast amount of scientific data that’s the point of the experiment. It’s really better if their not turning the rooms lights off trying to hit some arbitrary target. PS: It was posted ~3AM and I am still out of it. So, I am kind of surprised how coherent that was even though I mess up conveying some heat was from electricity where the other heat was from fusion.
zeristor 6y ago
I’m not sure if you can quite say the UK has left. The UK is part of ITER via Euratom, which requires EU membership. It seems the UK is in a grace period for the time being, but hasnt quite left: https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3394 https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3394
- ben_w 6y ago
  I thought the UK has left, giving notice for Euratom explicitly at the same time as for the EU because the UK government wasn’t sure leaving Euratom would be automatic? And that Switzerland was a participating associated state?
  - zeristor 6y ago
    From the ITER link, the UK has left Euratom, but not fully left ITER due to a grace period, with the hope that the UK will in some way join ITER. As I understand it from the links I’ve found the UK has not explicitly left ITER yet.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      Ah, looks like I misunderstood your initial post, I incorrectly thought you were saying the UK was still in Euratom. My bad. :)
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    UK leaving EURATOM was widely criticised, I struggle to see how it makes any sence to leave an purely technical institution that has nothing to do with brexit.
- andyjohnson0 6y ago
  The UK left Euratom on 31st January 2020.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  But ITER is not EU only, having the US and other countries, so they might still participate (Regardless of the merits of ITER of course)
KingOfCoders 6y ago
I think this is more comparable in goals to the Wendelstein 7-X project.
DrBazza 6y ago
ITER isn't all it's cracked up to be. Certainly some senior fusion scientists don't believe so: 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...
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Only half way through the article, but the issue does not appear to be that ITER project in praticular has a glaring flaw. Rather, the scientist appears to be sceptical of fusion as a near term practical energy source on the whole. I feel that humanity will never amount to anything without fusion. Energy requirements of space travel assure of that.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    DT fusion is bad for space travel. The reactors are simply too large, and burn only a small fraction of their mass in fuel before they are too damaged to continue. ITER, for example, if it could be operated continuously forever (it cannot) would take 300,000 years to fuse its own mass in fuel.
    - hu3 6y ago
      I see DT fusion as a stepping stone to evolution. It doesn't have to be the answer for space travel or even Earth's clean energy. If within a few thousand years we managed to go from illiteracy to studying fusion, I'm hopeful of what can be achieved within the next few thousand years.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        Evolution explores huge numbers of dead ends. So if we go with that metaphor, the most likely fate of fusion is failure and extinction.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      "would take 300,000 years to fuse its own mass in fuel." Most of ITER's mass is concrete in the building, are you including that?
hardlianotion 6y ago
Sure, but the article does mention that results from MAST Upgrade feedback into preparations for ITER. It's not either-or.
montalbano 6y ago
The video in the link clearly states (2:37) that data from this experiment will feed directly into ITER.
hankchinaski 6y ago
i am not sure but in the promo video they say that the data coming out of this project is fed into ITER, which is the whole purpose of this project supposedly to collect data
forgot_user1234 6y ago
DISAGREE on this. Real innovation happens bottoms up. co-operation at national level is all a spectacle.
- luovatek 6y ago
  You might be right on this one. I'm a bit curious if any other HN-reader is aware of the private fusion project (aka the SAFIRE project) which is now run by the company Aureon Energy (https://aureon.ca/ https://aureon.ca/). I do highly recommend watching the video (also available on the legacy page https://safireproject.com/ https://safireproject.com/) for the video recording of the experiments. It's not yet quite mainstream physics but we have to remember that once upon the time the mainstream physics people didn't think that heavier-than-air flying machines are possible while nowadays they have wasted countless billions on their fusion experiments and achieved close to nothing.
  - willis936 6y ago
    > we have to remember that once upon the time the mainstream physics people didn't think that heavier-than-air flying machines are possible while nowadays they have wasted countless billions on their fusion experiments and achieved close to nothing Challenging authority gets you cool-guy points, but does nothing for actual understanding. “The experts don’t know what they’re talking about and are blinded by tribalism” is rhetoric of the 20th century. Physics has moved on.
    - luovatek 6y ago
      So you say. Though I don't see any evidence humanity as a whole has moved past groupthink. But yeah, I might be wrong about SAFIRE, as I haven't done any fusion experiments myself, just read a bit of research.
      - willis936 6y ago
        I work with fusion researchers. We regularly talk about non-mainstream designs and unexplored areas of physics. It’s a lot of fun. The mainstream is mainstream because it’s what works, not because that’s what our fathers built. The theoretical physicists are actively working on a dozen empirical models. They throw out what they need to. No one’s saying “don’t fund alternatives”. Fund alternatives. Show that they work. They haven’t in the past, but if one did the most excited people will be the mainstream fusion researchers.
pg_bot 6y ago
Advances in high temperature superconductors have made ITER obsolete before it will be finished. They won't ever be able to produce electricity, whereas the current generation of fusion reactor designs have a decent shot at it. Though it would be politically difficult, it likely would be pragmatic to scrap the current design and start over.

Retric 6y ago

Those are very different projects with very different goals. ITER is designed conservatively to produce 10x fusion energy output vs electrical energy input. As in you out 1 MW of electricity in and get 1 + 10 = 11MW of heat output. While not designed to be an economic fusion system it would unequivocally demonstrate a working design and a provide a test bed for experiments relating to reactor materials and full scale operations. This however is aimed to explore novel geometries which may aid in future designs. However, the net efficiency at this scale would be vastly lower. It’s still a useful project, but it’s just one of many possible designs.

raducu 6y ago
Why would it not be economic? After the first reactor, do we expect building a replica, without all the R&D costs would be significantly more expensive than a standard nuclear reactor? To me, 10x the energy sounds really good.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  10x energy doesnt mean 10x electricity. How one captures that energy and converts it effectively remains an open question. Can all those particles be turned into heat? Will those particles degrade the reactor so fast that it is no longer economically viable?
  - arethuza 6y ago
    ITER seems to be addressing the "capture the energy" part? https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork "The neutrons will be absorbed by the surrounding walls of the tokamak, where their kinetic energy will be transferred to the walls as heat. In ITER, this heat will be captured by cooling water circulating in the vessel walls and eventually dispersed through cooling towers. In the type of fusion power plant envisaged for the second half of this century, the heat will be used to produce steam and—by way of turbines and alternators—electricity."
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      And without breeding blankets, yes you can capture the heat, but you rapidly run out of tritium. ITER will only be operate on DT for a few weeks, total over its lifetime, before the available tritium supply is exhausted (and its materials reach their neutron limits). A "real" reactor will need to have tritium breeding blankets to regenerate the tritium. Otherwise, the cost of tritium alone, if made in fission reactors, for a 1 GW(e) DT fusion reactor would be $15B/year.
      - arethuza 6y ago
        Isn't testing that approach of breeding tritium explicitly part of what ITER is trying to do with its TBM programme?
        pfdietz 6y ago
        ITER has a few places where test blanket modules can be installed. ITER will not be able to simulate the neutronic environment of a full reactor (and so will not be able to confirm adequate breeding), nor subject the modules to the cumulative neutron loading they will have to withstand. For this reason, a Fusion Nuclear Science Facility has long been proposed as something that will be needed before DEMO is built. This could be a small, Q < 1 DT fusion device, as the goal would not be plasma physics related. It itself will need to breed its own tritium to operate long enough, so there's a circular dependency in the development.
        njarboe 6y ago
        There are many such technology advances needed for fusion power to work. This is why spending $22 billion on ITER is a very inefficient use of money for research. Maybe as a diplomatic effort of having all the world's major powers [] (China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States) work together it is worth it. Sort of like the space station. Big symbol and cost but little scientific value per dollar. Unfortunately the budget for ITER comes out of the US science budget instead of the State Department. Most US fusion funding only goes to ITER at this point.
- swebs 6y ago
  Because ITER is not designed to be running for more than a few minutes at a time. Its successor, DEMO, will be designed for continuous power output. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station
jbms 6y ago
It's not 10-11MW heat out for 1MW electricity in. It's "500 MW plasma from 50 MW of injected thermal power" which would need 300 MW electrical input. After conversion back to electricity, it might give as much electricity out as is put in! See these links for more: Question asked in the EU parliament: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-000812_EN.html https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-00081... https://news.newenergytimes.net/2020/11/03/open-letter-to-iter-director-general-about-iter-power-claims/ https://news.newenergytimes.net/2020/11/03/open-letter-to-it...
- Retric 6y ago
  Useful clarification, but I think ITER’s website makes it unambiguous. For 50 MW of injected heating power it will produce 500 MW of fusion power for long pulses of 400 to 600 seconds. https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals. To be more clear, injected heating power excludes the energy required to get to a steady state, as otherwise pulse length needs to be factored in. That said ITER is running a lot of equipment unnecessary for a commercial power plant making engendering Q factors misleading. For example a power plant would not need to collect, process, and store the vast amount of scientific data that’s the point of the experiment. It’s really better if their not turning the rooms lights off trying to hit some arbitrary target. PS: It was posted ~3AM and I am still out of it. So, I am kind of surprised how coherent that was even though I mess up conveying some heat was from electricity where the other heat was from fusion.

zeristor 6y ago

I’m not sure if you can quite say the UK has left. The UK is part of ITER via Euratom, which requires EU membership. It seems the UK is in a grace period for the time being, but hasnt quite left: https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3394 https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3394

ben_w 6y ago
I thought the UK has left, giving notice for Euratom explicitly at the same time as for the EU because the UK government wasn’t sure leaving Euratom would be automatic? And that Switzerland was a participating associated state?
- zeristor 6y ago
  From the ITER link, the UK has left Euratom, but not fully left ITER due to a grace period, with the hope that the UK will in some way join ITER. As I understand it from the links I’ve found the UK has not explicitly left ITER yet.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    Ah, looks like I misunderstood your initial post, I incorrectly thought you were saying the UK was still in Euratom. My bad. :)
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  UK leaving EURATOM was widely criticised, I struggle to see how it makes any sence to leave an purely technical institution that has nothing to do with brexit.
andyjohnson0 6y ago
The UK left Euratom on 31st January 2020.
raverbashing 6y ago
But ITER is not EU only, having the US and other countries, so they might still participate (Regardless of the merits of ITER of course)

KingOfCoders 6y ago

I think this is more comparable in goals to the Wendelstein 7-X project.

DrBazza 6y ago

ITER isn't all it's cracked up to be. Certainly some senior fusion scientists don't believe so: 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...

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Only half way through the article, but the issue does not appear to be that ITER project in praticular has a glaring flaw. Rather, the scientist appears to be sceptical of fusion as a near term practical energy source on the whole. I feel that humanity will never amount to anything without fusion. Energy requirements of space travel assure of that.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  DT fusion is bad for space travel. The reactors are simply too large, and burn only a small fraction of their mass in fuel before they are too damaged to continue. ITER, for example, if it could be operated continuously forever (it cannot) would take 300,000 years to fuse its own mass in fuel.
  - hu3 6y ago
    I see DT fusion as a stepping stone to evolution. It doesn't have to be the answer for space travel or even Earth's clean energy. If within a few thousand years we managed to go from illiteracy to studying fusion, I'm hopeful of what can be achieved within the next few thousand years.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Evolution explores huge numbers of dead ends. So if we go with that metaphor, the most likely fate of fusion is failure and extinction.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    "would take 300,000 years to fuse its own mass in fuel." Most of ITER's mass is concrete in the building, are you including that?

hardlianotion 6y ago

Sure, but the article does mention that results from MAST Upgrade feedback into preparations for ITER. It's not either-or.

montalbano 6y ago

The video in the link clearly states (2:37) that data from this experiment will feed directly into ITER.

hankchinaski 6y ago

i am not sure but in the promo video they say that the data coming out of this project is fed into ITER, which is the whole purpose of this project supposedly to collect data

forgot_user1234 6y ago

DISAGREE on this. Real innovation happens bottoms up. co-operation at national level is all a spectacle.

luovatek 6y ago
You might be right on this one. I'm a bit curious if any other HN-reader is aware of the private fusion project (aka the SAFIRE project) which is now run by the company Aureon Energy (https://aureon.ca/ https://aureon.ca/). I do highly recommend watching the video (also available on the legacy page https://safireproject.com/ https://safireproject.com/) for the video recording of the experiments. It's not yet quite mainstream physics but we have to remember that once upon the time the mainstream physics people didn't think that heavier-than-air flying machines are possible while nowadays they have wasted countless billions on their fusion experiments and achieved close to nothing.
- willis936 6y ago
  > we have to remember that once upon the time the mainstream physics people didn't think that heavier-than-air flying machines are possible while nowadays they have wasted countless billions on their fusion experiments and achieved close to nothing Challenging authority gets you cool-guy points, but does nothing for actual understanding. “The experts don’t know what they’re talking about and are blinded by tribalism” is rhetoric of the 20th century. Physics has moved on.
  - luovatek 6y ago
    So you say. Though I don't see any evidence humanity as a whole has moved past groupthink. But yeah, I might be wrong about SAFIRE, as I haven't done any fusion experiments myself, just read a bit of research.
    - willis936 6y ago
      I work with fusion researchers. We regularly talk about non-mainstream designs and unexplored areas of physics. It’s a lot of fun. The mainstream is mainstream because it’s what works, not because that’s what our fathers built. The theoretical physicists are actively working on a dozen empirical models. They throw out what they need to. No one’s saying “don’t fund alternatives”. Fund alternatives. Show that they work. They haven’t in the past, but if one did the most excited people will be the mainstream fusion researchers.

pg_bot 6y ago

Advances in high temperature superconductors have made ITER obsolete before it will be finished. They won't ever be able to produce electricity, whereas the current generation of fusion reactor designs have a decent shot at it. Though it would be politically difficult, it likely would be pragmatic to scrap the current design and start over.