9 ms·

Why the international experimental nuclear fusion reactor is in 'big trouble'

52 points by sandebert 2y ago

transfire 2y ago
The whole thing was designed to be a money sink from day one, draining money away from research that might actually succeed.
- ainonsense44 2y ago
  Do you have any substantial proof for that claim?
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    After skimming ITER's long history - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iter#Organisation_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iter#Organisation_history - I'd interpret user transfire's comment as cynical/sarcastic. A bit more realistically, one could describe ITER's top goals as photo ops for politicians, checking boxes for diplomats, and life-long employment for careerists. Wikipedia's summary has conceptual design work ending in 1990, but tokamak assembly not starting 'till 2020. They're hoping for "first plasma" in ~2034. That is not the timeline of a project where scientific results or technological success actually matter to the folks in charge.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      > That is not the timeline of a project where scientific results or technological success actually matter to the folks in charge. What is the correct time-line for a project that exists at the boundaries of theoretical physics and mega-engineering? In the history of humanity's major projects, 50 years is not even a blip. Europe's grand cathedrals took centuries to complete.
      - bell-cot 2y ago
        If you are building a cathedral - in theory to glorify God, in practice as a prestige item for your municipality and its ruling classes, and social unifier, and make-work project for your working classes, and etc. - then "it will take 250 years to complete" is a feature. It's not like your dead will be sent to wait in the fires of Hell until the day when the cathedral is finished. If your degrading climate and straining electrical grid need economical & at-scale fusion power NOW, that's a rather different situation. When stimulated by burning military needs, fission technology went from the the first fission experiments in the US in Jan'39, to the Chicago Pile (first nuclear chain reaction) in Jan'42, to military use of fission bombs in Aug'45, to routine operational deployments of fission-powered military submarines (a very demanding application) the late 1950's.
        tsimionescu 2y ago
        > If your degrading climate and straining electrical grid need economical & at-scale fusion power NOW, that's a rather different situation. Fusion power is not a realistic solution to global warming. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, where every single current fusion power project hits its declared milestones successfully, fusion power will not be a major part (say, more than 1%) of global electricity production by 2100. Renewables, fission, and degrowth are the only possible solutions to avoid climate catastrophe. Fusion might be a path to greater reliability and prosperity in the subsequent centuries, if we avoid the worse outcomes of global warming. > When stimulated by burning military needs, fission technology went from the the first fission experiments in the US in Jan'39, to the Chicago Pile (first nuclear chain reaction) in Jan'42, to military use of fission bombs in Aug'45, to routine operational deployments of fission-powered military submarines (a very demanding application) the late 1950's. Fusion reactions are incredibly more complex than fission. All you need to make a fission power plant is a large-ish mass of fissile material clumped together - it heats up and boils water. The rest is control to prevent various runoffs or runaway reactions. In contrast, fusion requires inchomprenaibly large pressures applied to a gas to even get one pair of atoms to fuse. Then, the energy of the fusion event tends to push other atoms away, requiring even more pressure to keep the reaction going. The only conceivable way to achieve this is using extraordinarily powerful magnets, and even the most powerful we know how to make require special shapes to actually achieve the required pressures in a relatively tiny volume. Then of course, they need cooling, and the whole structure needs to be solid enough to hold the mass of the magnets. So, fusion needs special magnets, special mathematical shapes, and numerous engineering challenges to contain all of these. It's not in any way surprising that it is going to take much more time to develop than fission took. Not to mention, the atom bomb was developed using enormous resources. The paultry 100B dollars over 50 years that ITER will probably take is nothing compared to the Manhattan Project (compared to the GDP of the time). The Manhattan Project at one time employed 133,000 people. Give ITER 65,000 employees and see if they can accelerate their time-line.
    - nkrisc 2y ago
      How long are scientific breakthroughs supposed to take?
      - bell-cot 2y ago
        If: You have finite resources -and- Excessive CO2 is pushing the only place where your species can live closer and closer to "no longer inhabitable" status ...then how many decades and $billions should you pour into a line of research which shows no signs of real-world utility, after 6+ decades and umpteem $billions of research?
- delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
  There are far bigger and arguably more useless 'money sinks' than ITER, which has since its inception cost about US$20 billion or so. The UK's HS2 project is projected to cost in the ballpark of £50 billion. This is literally a railway line—something that people have been building for a couple of centuries now. Sure, there's a bunch of land acquisition and construction, but it's still a bit of a joke how expensive it's got. The F-35 project has an estimated lifetime cost of US$1.5 trillion. This is a full two orders of magnitude more than ITER. Sure, this is meant to be spread out over the next 50 years or so, but the initial production cost over-runs were so big it isn't even funny. Plenty of mass rapid transit systems easily run into the tens of billions of American/Australian/Singapore dollars/pounds sterling/euro. In contrast to all of these, the money given to ITER is a complete pittance for the sort of science and results that it is expected to generate from the late 2020s. It is a big construction project, similar to a large airport or skyscraper. (Let's not even talk about how expensive Berlin Brandenburg airport got—it's a bunch of bitumen tarmac and a handful of buildings that managed to punch past 6 billion euro.) Its construction has steadily and consistently progressed in the past eight years that I've been paying close attention to it. I am fully confident that it will meet its timeline of first plasma in the late 2020s. Probably closer to 2025, actually.
  - preisschild 2y ago
    None of the things you mentioned are useless at all. High Speed Rail (and other Megaprojects) get even more expansive the longer you dont build them. We need to fund it even when its expansive, because that money is also spent on recruiting and training new workers, rebuilding supply chains and so on. And the F-35 was the first mass produced Generation 5 fighter and it still is the only one. Definitely not useless for deterring enemies of freedom such as Iran, Russia and China.
    - preisschild 2y ago
      I'd even argue that ITER is more useless than both your examples. High Speed Rail and modern defense do not have good alternatives to them. Fusion has an alternative: Fission. Sure, it might not be as sustainable in the long term (although with wide deployment of Breeder Reactors it might be), but we have enough Uranium for the short term anyway. And we have many decades of experience with them, how to deploy them most economically, how to use them with the least downtime (more than 90% uptime in many reactors) and so on.
- andyjohnson0 2y ago
  Its always disappointing to see this kind of pointlessly cynical comment on HN. We should do better than this. As other commenters have said, ITER's budget is pretty small compared to both other similar projects, and to the magnitude of the potential pay-off.
- RandomThoughts3 2y ago
  Not really, no. The main issue of ITER is that it’s an international project before being an experimental reactor. Some parts were given to countries which really wanted to build an expertise in a domain instead of giving them to countries with a proven track record/expertise. Japan got a lot of responsibilities they shouldn’t have had if the project was to be delivered on time for example.
bun_terminator 2y ago
ITER hasn't been the "International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor" for a very long time now. Why does it keep being called that? Even Wikipedia uses it correctly. I don't understand where people keep pulling that term from. Even high-profile publications like Scientific American keep using the old term.
- Digit-Al 2y ago
  Probably because they don't want to confuse readers who don't know the history and would wonder how on earth ITER could possibly stand for "International nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject". Let's face it, changing the project name but still calling it ITER is a bit confusing.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  From a journalist's PoV, 100% of readers need a quick summary of what ITER is. Vs. 0% actually need to know the current official name. (As a former SciAm subscriber - '70's to '90's - I would not look to current-day SciAm for examples of anything good.)
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > ITER hasn't been the "International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor" for a very long time now. Why does it keep being called that? Because that's its name? You can't choose how other people refer to you. Similarly, when Kentucky Fried Chicken officially changed its name to KFC, nobody cared, and KFC continued to mean Kentucky Fried Chicken in every context except the imagination of some executives.
lyu07282 2y ago
[flagged]
- godelski 2y ago
  Also "so what?" There's competition? Oh no... I think a lot of people aren't aware why ITER was constructed. A big part was to reduce risk. Risk not as in cost, but risk as in failing to generate fusion. It's a big science project and its success will make all the private companies that much better because the knowledge it will produce. ITER is not in competition with private companies in a sense of building a product. ITER never was and never will be a power plant. It is a research device. The only competition is bragging rights of begin first.
  - lyu07282 2y ago
    People think ITER is a power plant that is literally going to power Europe or something instead of the research project that it actually is. The idea that you still have to defend long-term foundational research against near-term profit-seeking proprietary "research" by private for-profit corporations is absurd, let alone reading this dribble in the guardian. What a neoliberal rag it has become.
    - ianburrell 2y ago
      ITER is the Chicago pile that demonstrated fission reaction. Fusion is harder than fission so there have been lots of Tokamaks working on fusion and controlling plasma. The next step is to run self-powered fusion for long periods. We haven’t done either part before. It needs to be demonstrated, studied, and controlled before can build power reactor.
      - godelski 2y ago
        I mean technically it doesn't __need__ to be demonstrated first. But given how long we've been failing at successfully creating fusion, it certainly makes sense to change strategies to: instead of being efficient, let's just make the damn thing work, and then study it so that we can then make efficient ones.
jokoon 2y ago
A good thing is others trying to build their own tokamak instead
XorNot 2y ago
This article is garbage. Which is to say, it is full of statements about ITER I've heard for decades at this point - namely, the illusive "industry will totally overtake ITER". It's been said before, and it hasn't happened: someone announces a thing, declares scale up in 5 years, 5 years passes and they don't have anything - but at the time all the people super-keen to have "totally called it" and prove how smart they are take a pre-emptive victory lap celebrating the success of the private industry over government science, or ITER or something...just slightly misremembering that it hasn't happened yet. Then it doesn't happen. This article is citing the US NIF as a potential competitor to ITER: it's not. In any possible way. Or to put it another way - the NIF took about 30 years to get to ignition. They are nowhere near Q > 1 (it's also basically not the goal of the facility - the facility is a nuclear weapons research lab first and foremost). I will confidently make a prediction here: in 5 years Helion will be dead. Commonwealth Fusion Systems still won't have anything. Tokamak Energy won't have anything. The link in this article about private investment is to another article which is already 7 years old. The website[1] of Tokamak energy talks about fusion "in the 2030s."[1] General fusion are saying break-even by 2026.[2] Tri-Alpha-Energy are saying early 2030s[3] for "Da Vinci" (which I'm just going to assume is their power producing prototype since it's hard to tell from the website). Commonwealth Fusion Systems say they're building SPARC right now as a net energy machine, but as of 2024 they are still building it[4]. You know, the next thing will just be "net energy" as a quick to-do point. Now...do I wish any of these company's ill-fortune? Not at all. I hope they succeed wildly and it turns out everything works great. We'll be several billion in research dollars ahead if someone cuts off ITER at the pass with a viable, cheaper reactor...but they haven't done it yet. You don't get to take a victory lap about their success when there aren't net energy fusion reactors out there. Because saying you can do it, and actually doing it are quite different - otherwise we'd have succeeded at fusion in the early 1970s when we were writing all the initial grant proposals, not spending the next decades learning about plasma stability, loss mechanisms and scaling rules. After all, people were very confident about Polywell fusion being the next big thing till...whoops, once you have the right model of what's happening it's pretty clear you can't get it to work.[5] [1] https://tokamakenergy.com/about-us-fusion-energy-high-temperature-superconducting-magnets/ https://tokamakenergy.com/about-us-fusion-energy-high-temper... [2] https://generalfusion.com/ https://generalfusion.com/ [3] https://tae.com/fusion-power/ https://tae.com/fusion-power/ [4] https://cfs.energy/technology#sparc-fusion-energy-demonstration https://cfs.energy/technology#sparc-fusion-energy-demonstrat... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
MrDresden 2y ago
Effectively unlimited clean energy is the goal. Let that sink in. Yes, ITER it self isn't ever going to be producing that energy but it is a step in the direction of that end goal. How can 5 billion dollars extra be considered too much for that end goal? Especially given everything that has happened on the world stage in the last 4 years, and had dramatic effects on the project. Not to mention that the collective yearly budgets of the nations involved is higher than 10 trillion dollars. Unlimited clean energy. A personal view on this is also that a rising tide lifts all boats. If the slow moving, very expensive international government project causes more nimble private enterprise to see a way to get there first and get a slice of the budget cake then great! Unlimited clean energy. It is worth it, IF we can get there. Multiple sized eggs in different baskets is the best plan.
- MaKey 2y ago
  I heard a podcast with people working at Wendelstein 7-X and they estimated that building a fusion power plant would cost 20 billion €. Far more money is spent on less important things.
  - credit_guy 2y ago
    I think that 20 billion euros is like the 20 million dollars estimate in the clip below (from the Big Bang Theory) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLF-8uiiTJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLF-8uiiTJ4
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    When it's overrun to 100 billion € and the project's "about to start showing results", would you feel the same?
- KevinMS 2y ago
  What if it turns out to practically generate energy from fusion you literally need a star out in space?
  - frankharv 2y ago
_heimdall 2y ago
I've been watching the promise of fusion power progress through my life and its been endlessly frustrating. Those involved continue to make unfounded claims and promises when the fact is that we simply don't know exactly how to make it work, or if it will work at all. Successes in one piece of the puzzle, like 2022's success in fusing deuterium and tritium, are paraded around with claims that we just "solved" fusion. In reality the success was a proof of concept that contained fusion is possible, and that it was done while requiring more energy input then was created. We're 14 years and $20 billion dollars into a project that was mean to take 10 years and $6bn. What have we learned? Plenty of small things certainly, but apparently they also believe to have learned all the unknowns and can now promise that it will only take 15 more years and another $40bn. I don't buy it, and no one else should either. They don't know how long it will take or what it will cost. 15 years isn't how long the construction process for a now fully understood reactor will take, its a bunch of fluff time hoping its enough to figure out what they still don't know. When do we say enough is enough and throw in the towel? Unlimited free, clean energy sounds great and all but it also sounds like snake oil. We would be much better off reducing our need for energy rather than continuing to chase a magic solution that we still don't understand how to build.
antiquark 2y ago
> "It was originally planned to line the tokamak reactor with protective beryllium but that turned out to be very tricky. It is toxic and eventually it was decided to replace it with tungsten... That was a major design change taken very late in the day.” The toxicity of beryllium is well known... how did this design decision go through? Someone was asleep at the wheel.
- WorkLobster 2y ago
  The Be would be inside the (radioactive) reactor vessel, which already has extremely strict isolation requirements. I believe it's accessed and maintained with robotics. As for the change, I'm just an interested amateur, so shouldn't go into details and please take this with a big grain of salt, but I've heard it was a result of proposed scenario(s) that some do not regard as realistic.
more_corn 2y ago
Is it because fusion doesn’t work? That it’s 20 years and $100B of investment away from working and always will be?

52 points by sandebert 2y ago

The whole thing was designed to be a money sink from day one, draining money away from research that might actually succeed.

ainonsense44 2y ago
Do you have any substantial proof for that claim?
- bell-cot 2y ago
  After skimming ITER's long history - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iter#Organisation_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iter#Organisation_history - I'd interpret user transfire's comment as cynical/sarcastic. A bit more realistically, one could describe ITER's top goals as photo ops for politicians, checking boxes for diplomats, and life-long employment for careerists. Wikipedia's summary has conceptual design work ending in 1990, but tokamak assembly not starting 'till 2020. They're hoping for "first plasma" in ~2034. That is not the timeline of a project where scientific results or technological success actually matter to the folks in charge.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    > That is not the timeline of a project where scientific results or technological success actually matter to the folks in charge. What is the correct time-line for a project that exists at the boundaries of theoretical physics and mega-engineering? In the history of humanity's major projects, 50 years is not even a blip. Europe's grand cathedrals took centuries to complete.
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      If you are building a cathedral - in theory to glorify God, in practice as a prestige item for your municipality and its ruling classes, and social unifier, and make-work project for your working classes, and etc. - then "it will take 250 years to complete" is a feature. It's not like your dead will be sent to wait in the fires of Hell until the day when the cathedral is finished. If your degrading climate and straining electrical grid need economical & at-scale fusion power NOW, that's a rather different situation. When stimulated by burning military needs, fission technology went from the the first fission experiments in the US in Jan'39, to the Chicago Pile (first nuclear chain reaction) in Jan'42, to military use of fission bombs in Aug'45, to routine operational deployments of fission-powered military submarines (a very demanding application) the late 1950's.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        > If your degrading climate and straining electrical grid need economical & at-scale fusion power NOW, that's a rather different situation. Fusion power is not a realistic solution to global warming. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, where every single current fusion power project hits its declared milestones successfully, fusion power will not be a major part (say, more than 1%) of global electricity production by 2100. Renewables, fission, and degrowth are the only possible solutions to avoid climate catastrophe. Fusion might be a path to greater reliability and prosperity in the subsequent centuries, if we avoid the worse outcomes of global warming. > When stimulated by burning military needs, fission technology went from the the first fission experiments in the US in Jan'39, to the Chicago Pile (first nuclear chain reaction) in Jan'42, to military use of fission bombs in Aug'45, to routine operational deployments of fission-powered military submarines (a very demanding application) the late 1950's. Fusion reactions are incredibly more complex than fission. All you need to make a fission power plant is a large-ish mass of fissile material clumped together - it heats up and boils water. The rest is control to prevent various runoffs or runaway reactions. In contrast, fusion requires inchomprenaibly large pressures applied to a gas to even get one pair of atoms to fuse. Then, the energy of the fusion event tends to push other atoms away, requiring even more pressure to keep the reaction going. The only conceivable way to achieve this is using extraordinarily powerful magnets, and even the most powerful we know how to make require special shapes to actually achieve the required pressures in a relatively tiny volume. Then of course, they need cooling, and the whole structure needs to be solid enough to hold the mass of the magnets. So, fusion needs special magnets, special mathematical shapes, and numerous engineering challenges to contain all of these. It's not in any way surprising that it is going to take much more time to develop than fission took. Not to mention, the atom bomb was developed using enormous resources. The paultry 100B dollars over 50 years that ITER will probably take is nothing compared to the Manhattan Project (compared to the GDP of the time). The Manhattan Project at one time employed 133,000 people. Give ITER 65,000 employees and see if they can accelerate their time-line.
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    How long are scientific breakthroughs supposed to take?
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      If: You have finite resources -and- Excessive CO2 is pushing the only place where your species can live closer and closer to "no longer inhabitable" status ...then how many decades and $billions should you pour into a line of research which shows no signs of real-world utility, after 6+ decades and umpteem $billions of research?
delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
There are far bigger and arguably more useless 'money sinks' than ITER, which has since its inception cost about US$20 billion or so. The UK's HS2 project is projected to cost in the ballpark of £50 billion. This is literally a railway line—something that people have been building for a couple of centuries now. Sure, there's a bunch of land acquisition and construction, but it's still a bit of a joke how expensive it's got. The F-35 project has an estimated lifetime cost of US$1.5 trillion. This is a full two orders of magnitude more than ITER. Sure, this is meant to be spread out over the next 50 years or so, but the initial production cost over-runs were so big it isn't even funny. Plenty of mass rapid transit systems easily run into the tens of billions of American/Australian/Singapore dollars/pounds sterling/euro. In contrast to all of these, the money given to ITER is a complete pittance for the sort of science and results that it is expected to generate from the late 2020s. It is a big construction project, similar to a large airport or skyscraper. (Let's not even talk about how expensive Berlin Brandenburg airport got—it's a bunch of bitumen tarmac and a handful of buildings that managed to punch past 6 billion euro.) Its construction has steadily and consistently progressed in the past eight years that I've been paying close attention to it. I am fully confident that it will meet its timeline of first plasma in the late 2020s. Probably closer to 2025, actually.
- preisschild 2y ago
  None of the things you mentioned are useless at all. High Speed Rail (and other Megaprojects) get even more expansive the longer you dont build them. We need to fund it even when its expansive, because that money is also spent on recruiting and training new workers, rebuilding supply chains and so on. And the F-35 was the first mass produced Generation 5 fighter and it still is the only one. Definitely not useless for deterring enemies of freedom such as Iran, Russia and China.
  - preisschild 2y ago
    I'd even argue that ITER is more useless than both your examples. High Speed Rail and modern defense do not have good alternatives to them. Fusion has an alternative: Fission. Sure, it might not be as sustainable in the long term (although with wide deployment of Breeder Reactors it might be), but we have enough Uranium for the short term anyway. And we have many decades of experience with them, how to deploy them most economically, how to use them with the least downtime (more than 90% uptime in many reactors) and so on.
andyjohnson0 2y ago
Its always disappointing to see this kind of pointlessly cynical comment on HN. We should do better than this. As other commenters have said, ITER's budget is pretty small compared to both other similar projects, and to the magnitude of the potential pay-off.
RandomThoughts3 2y ago
Not really, no. The main issue of ITER is that it’s an international project before being an experimental reactor. Some parts were given to countries which really wanted to build an expertise in a domain instead of giving them to countries with a proven track record/expertise. Japan got a lot of responsibilities they shouldn’t have had if the project was to be delivered on time for example.

bun_terminator 2y ago

ITER hasn't been the "International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor" for a very long time now. Why does it keep being called that? Even Wikipedia uses it correctly. I don't understand where people keep pulling that term from. Even high-profile publications like Scientific American keep using the old term.

Digit-Al 2y ago
Probably because they don't want to confuse readers who don't know the history and would wonder how on earth ITER could possibly stand for "International nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject". Let's face it, changing the project name but still calling it ITER is a bit confusing.
bell-cot 2y ago
From a journalist's PoV, 100% of readers need a quick summary of what ITER is. Vs. 0% actually need to know the current official name. (As a former SciAm subscriber - '70's to '90's - I would not look to current-day SciAm for examples of anything good.)
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> ITER hasn't been the "International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor" for a very long time now. Why does it keep being called that? Because that's its name? You can't choose how other people refer to you. Similarly, when Kentucky Fried Chicken officially changed its name to KFC, nobody cared, and KFC continued to mean Kentucky Fried Chicken in every context except the imagination of some executives.

lyu07282 2y ago

[flagged]

godelski 2y ago
Also "so what?" There's competition? Oh no... I think a lot of people aren't aware why ITER was constructed. A big part was to reduce risk. Risk not as in cost, but risk as in failing to generate fusion. It's a big science project and its success will make all the private companies that much better because the knowledge it will produce. ITER is not in competition with private companies in a sense of building a product. ITER never was and never will be a power plant. It is a research device. The only competition is bragging rights of begin first.
- lyu07282 2y ago
  People think ITER is a power plant that is literally going to power Europe or something instead of the research project that it actually is. The idea that you still have to defend long-term foundational research against near-term profit-seeking proprietary "research" by private for-profit corporations is absurd, let alone reading this dribble in the guardian. What a neoliberal rag it has become.
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    ITER is the Chicago pile that demonstrated fission reaction. Fusion is harder than fission so there have been lots of Tokamaks working on fusion and controlling plasma. The next step is to run self-powered fusion for long periods. We haven’t done either part before. It needs to be demonstrated, studied, and controlled before can build power reactor.
    - godelski 2y ago
      I mean technically it doesn't __need__ to be demonstrated first. But given how long we've been failing at successfully creating fusion, it certainly makes sense to change strategies to: instead of being efficient, let's just make the damn thing work, and then study it so that we can then make efficient ones.

jokoon 2y ago

A good thing is others trying to build their own tokamak instead

XorNot 2y ago

This article is garbage. Which is to say, it is full of statements about ITER I've heard for decades at this point - namely, the illusive "industry will totally overtake ITER". It's been said before, and it hasn't happened: someone announces a thing, declares scale up in 5 years, 5 years passes and they don't have anything - but at the time all the people super-keen to have "totally called it" and prove how smart they are take a pre-emptive victory lap celebrating the success of the private industry over government science, or ITER or something...just slightly misremembering that it hasn't happened yet. Then it doesn't happen. This article is citing the US NIF as a potential competitor to ITER: it's not. In any possible way. Or to put it another way - the NIF took about 30 years to get to ignition. They are nowhere near Q > 1 (it's also basically not the goal of the facility - the facility is a nuclear weapons research lab first and foremost). I will confidently make a prediction here: in 5 years Helion will be dead. Commonwealth Fusion Systems still won't have anything. Tokamak Energy won't have anything. The link in this article about private investment is to another article which is already 7 years old. The website[1] of Tokamak energy talks about fusion "in the 2030s."[1] General fusion are saying break-even by 2026.[2] Tri-Alpha-Energy are saying early 2030s[3] for "Da Vinci" (which I'm just going to assume is their power producing prototype since it's hard to tell from the website). Commonwealth Fusion Systems say they're building SPARC right now as a net energy machine, but as of 2024 they are still building it[4]. You know, the next thing will just be "net energy" as a quick to-do point. Now...do I wish any of these company's ill-fortune? Not at all. I hope they succeed wildly and it turns out everything works great. We'll be several billion in research dollars ahead if someone cuts off ITER at the pass with a viable, cheaper reactor...but they haven't done it yet. You don't get to take a victory lap about their success when there aren't net energy fusion reactors out there. Because saying you can do it, and actually doing it are quite different - otherwise we'd have succeeded at fusion in the early 1970s when we were writing all the initial grant proposals, not spending the next decades learning about plasma stability, loss mechanisms and scaling rules. After all, people were very confident about Polywell fusion being the next big thing till...whoops, once you have the right model of what's happening it's pretty clear you can't get it to work.[5] [1] https://tokamakenergy.com/about-us-fusion-energy-high-temperature-superconducting-magnets/ https://tokamakenergy.com/about-us-fusion-energy-high-temper... [2] https://generalfusion.com/ https://generalfusion.com/ [3] https://tae.com/fusion-power/ https://tae.com/fusion-power/ [4] https://cfs.energy/technology#sparc-fusion-energy-demonstration https://cfs.energy/technology#sparc-fusion-energy-demonstrat... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

MrDresden 2y ago

Effectively unlimited clean energy is the goal. Let that sink in. Yes, ITER it self isn't ever going to be producing that energy but it is a step in the direction of that end goal. How can 5 billion dollars extra be considered too much for that end goal? Especially given everything that has happened on the world stage in the last 4 years, and had dramatic effects on the project. Not to mention that the collective yearly budgets of the nations involved is higher than 10 trillion dollars. Unlimited clean energy. A personal view on this is also that a rising tide lifts all boats. If the slow moving, very expensive international government project causes more nimble private enterprise to see a way to get there first and get a slice of the budget cake then great! Unlimited clean energy. It is worth it, IF we can get there. Multiple sized eggs in different baskets is the best plan.

MaKey 2y ago
I heard a podcast with people working at Wendelstein 7-X and they estimated that building a fusion power plant would cost 20 billion €. Far more money is spent on less important things.
- credit_guy 2y ago
  I think that 20 billion euros is like the 20 million dollars estimate in the clip below (from the Big Bang Theory) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLF-8uiiTJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLF-8uiiTJ4
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  When it's overrun to 100 billion € and the project's "about to start showing results", would you feel the same?
KevinMS 2y ago
What if it turns out to practically generate energy from fusion you literally need a star out in space?
- frankharv 2y ago

_heimdall 2y ago

I've been watching the promise of fusion power progress through my life and its been endlessly frustrating. Those involved continue to make unfounded claims and promises when the fact is that we simply don't know exactly how to make it work, or if it will work at all. Successes in one piece of the puzzle, like 2022's success in fusing deuterium and tritium, are paraded around with claims that we just "solved" fusion. In reality the success was a proof of concept that contained fusion is possible, and that it was done while requiring more energy input then was created. We're 14 years and $20 billion dollars into a project that was mean to take 10 years and $6bn. What have we learned? Plenty of small things certainly, but apparently they also believe to have learned all the unknowns and can now promise that it will only take 15 more years and another $40bn. I don't buy it, and no one else should either. They don't know how long it will take or what it will cost. 15 years isn't how long the construction process for a now fully understood reactor will take, its a bunch of fluff time hoping its enough to figure out what they still don't know. When do we say enough is enough and throw in the towel? Unlimited free, clean energy sounds great and all but it also sounds like snake oil. We would be much better off reducing our need for energy rather than continuing to chase a magic solution that we still don't understand how to build.

antiquark 2y ago

> "It was originally planned to line the tokamak reactor with protective beryllium but that turned out to be very tricky. It is toxic and eventually it was decided to replace it with tungsten... That was a major design change taken very late in the day.” The toxicity of beryllium is well known... how did this design decision go through? Someone was asleep at the wheel.

WorkLobster 2y ago
The Be would be inside the (radioactive) reactor vessel, which already has extremely strict isolation requirements. I believe it's accessed and maintained with robotics. As for the change, I'm just an interested amateur, so shouldn't go into details and please take this with a big grain of salt, but I've heard it was a result of proposed scenario(s) that some do not regard as realistic.

more_corn 2y ago

Is it because fusion doesn’t work? That it’s 20 years and $100B of investment away from working and always will be?