5 ms·

I thought ITER was the biggest tokamak. BTW, what is the status of ITER?

clouddrover 3y ago
Still building it. Start is scheduled for late 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Timeline_and_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Timeline_and_status https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  I love how they won't even start putting the actual fuel (deuterium-tritium) into it for another decade, and then it's still just a research reactor, so it has no hope of producing a useful amount of recoverable electricity. For that, there's the upcoming DEMO reactor, which will demonstrate (hence the name) electricity generation no earlier than 2048, a quarter of a century from today. In 2050, half way through the century, according to the EU plans for fusion power, there will be one (1) fusion power plant on the continent that can make any amount of electricity, for a net cost of $100 billion. That $100 billion could have purchased 100 GW of installed utility-scale solar at 2022 prices[1], which continue to drop. By 2050, that amount of money could have likely purchased 200 GW plus batteries, covering about 50% of the European Union electricity demand. Instead the EU will have a single ~1 GW of fusion power plant, with each additional gigawatt costing ten-plus billion, vastly more expensive than renewable energy sources by that decade. [1] https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost.html https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...
  - sgift 3y ago
    Yes, research costs money at first in the hope of getting results later. Comparing it to buying something is only useful if you think what the research does can also be achieved by that. Since you ignore the question of whether Europe even has space for 100 or 200GW of solar power, that this power is only intermediately available (though there's hope that storage will be somewhat solved in 2050 using ... research!) and so on. We could get Fusion faster. That would cost more money. Governments are not willing to invest that, so we stay the course with the slow path. edit: Also, your 100b estimate is even higher than the - disputed - worst case assumptions of the DOE, which is somewhere between 45 to 65b. Also: http://www.iter.org/faq#Do_we_really_know_how_much_ITER_will_cost http://www.iter.org/faq#Do_we_really_know_how_much_ITER_will...
    - Kon5ole 3y ago
      >Since you ignore the question of whether Europe even has space for 100 or 200GW of solar power That's a question that can safely be ignored though, Germany alone has installed rooftop solar on a small percentage of homes and is already at 70GW. Space is not a problem for solar, you can install it everywhere. It's so cheap now that it's viable even in sub-optimal locations. >though there's hope that storage will be somewhat solved in 2050 using ... research! It is solved already, all that remains to do is to build it. Germany has enough gas storage to last a year, and we know how to generate gas from electricity. It's being done in several places already. I think the major hold-up is political. Moving energy production from the current government-controlled central power plants to small-scale operations close to the consumer is too disruptive for lots of reasons. But I have hope that eventually we'll get there, it just takes time. That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        > It is solved already, all that remains to do is to build it. Germany has enough gas storage to last a year, and we know how to generate gas from electricity. It's being done in several places already. If storage is solved, then I think we would've heard about it. > That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both. Who is using this as a reason to not do the other thing?
        Kon5ole 3y ago
        >If storage is solved, then I think we would've heard about it. Here's one of many many ways how the storage problem has been solved: https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/products-services/product-offerings/hydrogen-solutions.html https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/products-servi... >Who is using this as a reason to not do the other thing? It's not stated directly of course but if you look at the money there is a discrepancy. The largest battery storage facility in Europe cost about 90 million euros, while the EU has granted over 5000 million to the ITER Tokamak project. So, clearly one thing is being done at a much larger scale than the other thing, deliberately or not.
  - rapnie 3y ago
    Well, if all this R&D investment gives us clean energy for the next centuries at affordable cost, it is an improvement right? And we don't have to cover our land and waters with solar farms that have their own externalities (limited lifetime, waste, harmful materials, etc).
    - raffraffraff 3y ago
      The problem is surviving long enough to make a fusion breakthrough. Fusion may actually be an impossible engineering problen. Fission is cheap and easy by comparison.
  - jl6 3y ago
    Many EU countries aren’t blessed with the square mileage and hours of sunlight required for giga-scale solar. A dense, continuous power source would be very welcome, even at a higher cost.
    - gnfargbl 3y ago
      Then why aren't those EU countries negotiating agreements with other less-well-off countries that are so blessed? Yes, that would require a cable. But it isn't rational to be in a situation where we believe we can build a fusion reactor, but some relatively simple civil engineering is apparently beyond us.
      - ragebol 3y ago
        Though not the EU anymore, but something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Power_Project?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe... The downside being you still don't have energy independence, if that is a goal.
        offices 3y ago
        It should be a goal. It's less than 2 years since a former EU ally used our dependence on them for energy as a bargaining tool.
        gnfargbl 3y ago
        We haven't had energy independence in Europe for decades. That risk is managed by hedging, and there's no reason we couldn't do the same with long-distance solar interconnects.
        adwn 3y ago
        > We haven't had energy independence in Europe for decades. Yes, and that has bitten us in the ass big time.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
  - AndrewDucker 3y ago
    It is worth doing multiple things, some short term, some long term. If you only ever invest in the solution which pays back right now, then you never get the next step. We should absolutely be doing both.
  - ragebol 3y ago
    Our energy needs are ever increasing. If we ever want to get to what is currently science fiction, we'll need fusion energy, otherwise we'll eventually blanket the Earth in solar panels. Maybe they'll be in time to provide energy to slurp carbon out of the atmosphere. Or power huge spacecraft etc etc.
    - shermantanktop 3y ago
      Various estimates put the US’s entire energy supply as requiring enough solar panels to fill a square between 100 and 150 miles on a side. If efficiency goes up (which has upper bounds) and panels are integrated into buildings, solar being that virtually limitless supply doesn’t seem far-fetched.
  - mythhabit 3y ago
    A fusion reactor is the long term game. Sure we could use that money to add more capacity to the grid, but what we need is to take fossil fuels offline and 200 GW would barely make a dent in the production from coal if the consumption continues to increase. In 2022 it was estimated that coal produced 44000 TWh and that number increase at an alarming rate every year. So we need to do something to meet the futures energy demands, but we also need to do something today. The smart thing is to invest in what we can do today, solar, wind and batteries, and invest what we can do in the near future, better fission reactors is one possibility, and invest in the long term, that could be fusion. It would be foolish to only invest in one of them.
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      Long term? You say that like the Sun will go out and we’ll need artificial power to survive.
      - mythhabit 3y ago
        If we rely on solar, we need a massive overcapacity. In large parts of the world the output of a solar panel is 50% in the winter compared to the summer, and in addition, we use significantly more power during the winter. And that will be even further exaggerated if fossils do not heat water for district heating in addition to the power produced - but perhaps that is offset by AC usage in the summer. Either way, we would need a significant overcapacity to meet demand, not to mention huge investments in battery infrastructure. And that does not even take predictable peaks into account (think the pause of a national event with lots of viewers, where people make coffee/tea/snacks at the same time), which needs fossil peaker plants, or even more battery capacity.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    2048 is twentyfive years from now.
  - specialist 3y ago
    Fusion is a terrific way to build and retain a knowledge skill stack indefinitely. IMHO, fusion is preferable to nukes (weapons) for that purpose.
  - nosrepa 3y ago
    ITER has no hope of producing any electricity because there are no turbines on site.
sgift 3y ago
It will be, when it starts. For now this is. It's testing things also needed later for ITER and DEMO.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  If DEMO is ever built. My sincerest hope is that Commonwealth Fusion Systems does so well with SPARC and ARC that DEMO never needs to be built. DEMO would be so incredibly expensive to build that it would never produce economical energy.
  - sgift 3y ago
    I hope for the same. But it's nice to know there's a backup in case none of the more "moonshoot" projects pan out.
CaptainSamJohn 3y ago
Also wondering if they resolved the main issue which is plasma disruptions in Tokamaks ? Because, you may build bigger and bigger Tokamaks but if the main issue is still there it won't change the result.
- bmitc 3y ago
  Commonwealth Fusion Systems holds the thesis that you need stronger magnets so that you make the reactor smaller.

Still building it. Start is scheduled for late 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Timeline_and_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Timeline_and_status https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones

jiggawatts 3y ago
I love how they won't even start putting the actual fuel (deuterium-tritium) into it for another decade, and then it's still just a research reactor, so it has no hope of producing a useful amount of recoverable electricity. For that, there's the upcoming DEMO reactor, which will demonstrate (hence the name) electricity generation no earlier than 2048, a quarter of a century from today. In 2050, half way through the century, according to the EU plans for fusion power, there will be one (1) fusion power plant on the continent that can make any amount of electricity, for a net cost of $100 billion. That $100 billion could have purchased 100 GW of installed utility-scale solar at 2022 prices[1], which continue to drop. By 2050, that amount of money could have likely purchased 200 GW plus batteries, covering about 50% of the European Union electricity demand. Instead the EU will have a single ~1 GW of fusion power plant, with each additional gigawatt costing ten-plus billion, vastly more expensive than renewable energy sources by that decade. [1] https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost.html https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...
- sgift 3y ago
  Yes, research costs money at first in the hope of getting results later. Comparing it to buying something is only useful if you think what the research does can also be achieved by that. Since you ignore the question of whether Europe even has space for 100 or 200GW of solar power, that this power is only intermediately available (though there's hope that storage will be somewhat solved in 2050 using ... research!) and so on. We could get Fusion faster. That would cost more money. Governments are not willing to invest that, so we stay the course with the slow path. edit: Also, your 100b estimate is even higher than the - disputed - worst case assumptions of the DOE, which is somewhere between 45 to 65b. Also: http://www.iter.org/faq#Do_we_really_know_how_much_ITER_will_cost http://www.iter.org/faq#Do_we_really_know_how_much_ITER_will...
  - Kon5ole 3y ago
    >Since you ignore the question of whether Europe even has space for 100 or 200GW of solar power That's a question that can safely be ignored though, Germany alone has installed rooftop solar on a small percentage of homes and is already at 70GW. Space is not a problem for solar, you can install it everywhere. It's so cheap now that it's viable even in sub-optimal locations. >though there's hope that storage will be somewhat solved in 2050 using ... research! It is solved already, all that remains to do is to build it. Germany has enough gas storage to last a year, and we know how to generate gas from electricity. It's being done in several places already. I think the major hold-up is political. Moving energy production from the current government-controlled central power plants to small-scale operations close to the consumer is too disruptive for lots of reasons. But I have hope that eventually we'll get there, it just takes time. That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > It is solved already, all that remains to do is to build it. Germany has enough gas storage to last a year, and we know how to generate gas from electricity. It's being done in several places already. If storage is solved, then I think we would've heard about it. > That said, spending billions on things that won't solve any problems for the nest 50 years and using that as a reason to not actually do the thing that will work is inexcusable. At least do both. Who is using this as a reason to not do the other thing?
      - Kon5ole 3y ago
        >If storage is solved, then I think we would've heard about it. Here's one of many many ways how the storage problem has been solved: https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/products-services/product-offerings/hydrogen-solutions.html https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/products-servi... >Who is using this as a reason to not do the other thing? It's not stated directly of course but if you look at the money there is a discrepancy. The largest battery storage facility in Europe cost about 90 million euros, while the EU has granted over 5000 million to the ITER Tokamak project. So, clearly one thing is being done at a much larger scale than the other thing, deliberately or not.
- rapnie 3y ago
  Well, if all this R&D investment gives us clean energy for the next centuries at affordable cost, it is an improvement right? And we don't have to cover our land and waters with solar farms that have their own externalities (limited lifetime, waste, harmful materials, etc).
  - raffraffraff 3y ago
    The problem is surviving long enough to make a fusion breakthrough. Fusion may actually be an impossible engineering problen. Fission is cheap and easy by comparison.
- jl6 3y ago
  Many EU countries aren’t blessed with the square mileage and hours of sunlight required for giga-scale solar. A dense, continuous power source would be very welcome, even at a higher cost.
  - gnfargbl 3y ago
    Then why aren't those EU countries negotiating agreements with other less-well-off countries that are so blessed? Yes, that would require a cable. But it isn't rational to be in a situation where we believe we can build a fusion reactor, but some relatively simple civil engineering is apparently beyond us.
    - ragebol 3y ago
      Though not the EU anymore, but something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Power_Project?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe... The downside being you still don't have energy independence, if that is a goal.
      - offices 3y ago
        It should be a goal. It's less than 2 years since a former EU ally used our dependence on them for energy as a bargaining tool.
      - gnfargbl 3y ago
        We haven't had energy independence in Europe for decades. That risk is managed by hedging, and there's no reason we couldn't do the same with long-distance solar interconnects.
        adwn 3y ago
        > We haven't had energy independence in Europe for decades. Yes, and that has bitten us in the ass big time.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
- AndrewDucker 3y ago
  It is worth doing multiple things, some short term, some long term. If you only ever invest in the solution which pays back right now, then you never get the next step. We should absolutely be doing both.
- ragebol 3y ago
  Our energy needs are ever increasing. If we ever want to get to what is currently science fiction, we'll need fusion energy, otherwise we'll eventually blanket the Earth in solar panels. Maybe they'll be in time to provide energy to slurp carbon out of the atmosphere. Or power huge spacecraft etc etc.
  - shermantanktop 3y ago
    Various estimates put the US’s entire energy supply as requiring enough solar panels to fill a square between 100 and 150 miles on a side. If efficiency goes up (which has upper bounds) and panels are integrated into buildings, solar being that virtually limitless supply doesn’t seem far-fetched.
- mythhabit 3y ago
  A fusion reactor is the long term game. Sure we could use that money to add more capacity to the grid, but what we need is to take fossil fuels offline and 200 GW would barely make a dent in the production from coal if the consumption continues to increase. In 2022 it was estimated that coal produced 44000 TWh and that number increase at an alarming rate every year. So we need to do something to meet the futures energy demands, but we also need to do something today. The smart thing is to invest in what we can do today, solar, wind and batteries, and invest what we can do in the near future, better fission reactors is one possibility, and invest in the long term, that could be fusion. It would be foolish to only invest in one of them.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Long term? You say that like the Sun will go out and we’ll need artificial power to survive.
    - mythhabit 3y ago
      If we rely on solar, we need a massive overcapacity. In large parts of the world the output of a solar panel is 50% in the winter compared to the summer, and in addition, we use significantly more power during the winter. And that will be even further exaggerated if fossils do not heat water for district heating in addition to the power produced - but perhaps that is offset by AC usage in the summer. Either way, we would need a significant overcapacity to meet demand, not to mention huge investments in battery infrastructure. And that does not even take predictable peaks into account (think the pause of a national event with lots of viewers, where people make coffee/tea/snacks at the same time), which needs fossil peaker plants, or even more battery capacity.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  2048 is twentyfive years from now.
- specialist 3y ago
  Fusion is a terrific way to build and retain a knowledge skill stack indefinitely. IMHO, fusion is preferable to nukes (weapons) for that purpose.
- nosrepa 3y ago
  ITER has no hope of producing any electricity because there are no turbines on site.

sgift 3y ago

It will be, when it starts. For now this is. It's testing things also needed later for ITER and DEMO.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
If DEMO is ever built. My sincerest hope is that Commonwealth Fusion Systems does so well with SPARC and ARC that DEMO never needs to be built. DEMO would be so incredibly expensive to build that it would never produce economical energy.
- sgift 3y ago
  I hope for the same. But it's nice to know there's a backup in case none of the more "moonshoot" projects pan out.

CaptainSamJohn 3y ago

Also wondering if they resolved the main issue which is plasma disruptions in Tokamaks ? Because, you may build bigger and bigger Tokamaks but if the main issue is still there it won't change the result.

bmitc 3y ago
Commonwealth Fusion Systems holds the thesis that you need stronger magnets so that you make the reactor smaller.