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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 s

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.
godelski 2y ago
In part I blame the news, as they exploit peoples lack of understanding of big numbers, time, and collaborative projects[0]. Look at the way that they talk about the growing cost[1]. It may seem large, but that's $20 billion spent in 14 years (1.42/yr), distributed across 35 countries (40m/yr if equal contributions). The extra $5bn by 2039 will turn that to 0.86bn/yr. Again, distributed between 35 countries (nonhomogeneously)[2]. This happens every time with these big science projects. People think they are extremely costly. In one sense they are, but in terms of your tax dollars? They're well within a rounding error. I mean we got over a dozen individuals that could independently build and maintain 10 CERNs (each of them could build 10 CERNs) if we consider the factors of time and compounding interest. Idk, it just does not seem like that much money to me. [0] The people writing the stories are probably equally dumb, but they have a responsibility to not be [1] You set out to do something no one has done before, you really think you'll make an accurate estimate? Especially when we have systems that reward underestimating over accuracy. How could this ever happen when we reward the lowest bidder and there are no consequences for being wrong? [2] US/China/India/South Korea/Japan/Russia each foot 10% of the bill. So ~$150m/yr by naive estimate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Funding

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.

godelski 2y ago

In part I blame the news, as they exploit peoples lack of understanding of big numbers, time, and collaborative projects[0]. Look at the way that they talk about the growing cost[1]. It may seem large, but that's $20 billion spent in 14 years (1.42/yr), distributed across 35 countries (40m/yr if equal contributions). The extra $5bn by 2039 will turn that to 0.86bn/yr. Again, distributed between 35 countries (nonhomogeneously)[2]. This happens every time with these big science projects. People think they are extremely costly. In one sense they are, but in terms of your tax dollars? They're well within a rounding error. I mean we got over a dozen individuals that could independently build and maintain 10 CERNs (each of them could build 10 CERNs) if we consider the factors of time and compounding interest. Idk, it just does not seem like that much money to me. [0] The people writing the stories are probably equally dumb, but they have a responsibility to not be [1] You set out to do something no one has done before, you really think you'll make an accurate estimate? Especially when we have systems that reward underestimating over accuracy. How could this ever happen when we reward the lowest bidder and there are no consequences for being wrong? [2] US/China/India/South Korea/Japan/Russia each foot 10% of the bill. So ~$150m/yr by naive estimate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Funding