Fusion experiment reaches halfway point

Argus · February 3, 2018

Described as the biggest, longest, most expensive science experiment in history, the ITER project reached the halfway mark last month. The one hundred billion experiment to construct a series of massive buildings which will ultimately allow for the production of fusion power gives promise of unlimited clean energy in the future. The wonder is much of the developed world has cooperated on this, with the EU leading the way, joined by Russia, the US and China. The first plasma is to be produced in 2025, heated to 150 million degrees - hotter than the sun.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/06/iter-nuclear-fusion-project-reaches-key-halfway-milestone

?Impact · February 3, 2018

5 hours ago, Argus said:

Described as the biggest, longest, most expensive science experiment in history

Yes, it is a big gamble but the potential payout is tremendous. Of course Donald will want the money to build a wall instead.

Bonam · February 3, 2018

ITER is a very cool project, and as someone that's contributed to parts of it, I can tell you with certainty that there is no meaning to the statement that it reached a "half way milestone". You'll note the article doesn't even mention what this milestone is. The reality is that work is ongoing but the timeline is always in flux, as some tasks turn out harder than expected while others (rarely) turn out easier than expected. Unlike building an office building or power plant, most of the work here is brand new and there are contributions from hundreds of private companies and universities each developing new pieces of technology that will be a part of ITER.

Further the article is misleading because it implies promise of a "new source of clean power by 2025". Even if there are no further delays (there have already been many) and first plasma is achieved in 2025, that would then only be the beginning of a minimum 5-10 year research campaign. ITER itself will not generate any electricity, it is only a research facility. If the 5-10 year research program starting in 2025 is extraordinarily successful, there may be just enough physics and engineering understanding to build a prototype power plant, which would likely take another 10-20 years to construct (ITER has been under construction for 10 years so far but design started in 1988 and first plasma is still 7+ years away). This prototype would then operate its own 5-10 year research program to demonstrate and optimize things. Only after that would there be any realistic hope of designing and building a commercially viable power plant (i.e. maybe in 2060). And that's if everything goes extraordinarily well, beyond the wildest dreams of anyone actually involved with technical aspects of fusion energy research.

That said, fusion energy is an important field of research and will possibly someday yield great benefits, and the science and engineering expertise gained as a result is well worth the cost, but these kinds of "hype" articles are not particularly representative of reality.

Edited February 3, 2018 by Bonam

?Impact · February 4, 2018

22 hours ago, Bonam said:

ITER is a very cool project, and as someone that's contributed to parts of it, I can tell you with certainty that there is no meaning to the statement that it reached a "half way milestone". You'll note the article doesn't even mention what this milestone is

I took it to mean halfway constructing the research facility, but I can see how that can be lost in the hype.

OftenWrong · February 5, 2018

On 03/02/2018 at 3:55 PM, ?Impact said:

Yes, it is a big gamble but the potential payout is tremendous. Of course Donald will want the money to build a wall instead.

In my work I receive news updates about new developments in nuclear power. We've seen that the Trump administration is in favour of more nuclear energy development.

Trump said his administration will attempt to expand the nuclear energy sector by launching a "complete review" of current policy to identify ways to revive the industry.

Link

Many countries in the west have fallen far behind in the development of new nuclear energy sources. Meanwhile the news briefs I receive show new developments every week in the building of nuclear power plants, and research into new sources, fuel, and waste management ongoing in Russia, and in China.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/

Edited February 5, 2018 by OftenWrong
link to WNN

Bonam · February 6, 2018

On 2/4/2018 at 1:35 PM, ?Impact said:

I took it to mean halfway constructing the research facility, but I can see how that can be lost in the hype.

That's what I was trying to say... it literally will not be possible to know when the research facility was half built until it's been fully built, because so many of the steps of building the facility involve as yet unknown amounts of effort to successfully complete. For example, I worked on a particular piece of a diagnostic system that will be used in ITER, which was part of an ongoing R&D process to develop. When ITER was designed, it was known that this diagnostic would be needed, but it didn't exist and no company or university in the world knew how to make it. About 10 years of research later, we managed to achieve the specifications required for ITER, but it could just as easily have been done in half the time or been found to be essentially impossible as far as the people who wrote up the original ITER timeline could have guessed (in fact, they vastly underestimated the difficulty of the problem).

There are thousands of other such parts and pieces of the ITER facility. Stuff that has known specifications/requirements, and that someone assigned a rough guess to in terms of how much time and budget they think it might take, but that require technology that does not yet exist or on science that is currently being researched. Therefore those timelines and budgets could (read: will) turn out very different in reality. For example, the current projected cost of ITER is about 10x the original cost estimate, and it's almost certain to balloon still further before all is said and done.

None of the above should be taken as me trying to put ITER down. In fact, I'm a big supporter of building it. But it should be realized that as cliche as it sounds, "the journey is more important than the destination". The science and engineering learned in the process of building ITER will be just as (if not more) important than the results once first plasma is achieved and research commences. Many of the advances made as a result of the effort to build ITER (including the diagnostic I mentioned above) are already in use at other, smaller scale, fusion energy research experiments as well as in wholly unrelated commercial applications.

It's still very much possible that ITER will fail. The best guesses of the word's foremost scientists in the field of fusion energy suggest that ITER will be big enough to achieve a long duration confined burning plasma, but that was thought before about some of the last generation tokamaks and turned out to be wrong. It could turn out that new, previously unencountered instabilities will affect the ITER plasma, after all, no one has ever tried to contain a fusion plasma with magnetic fields for more than a few seconds. But even if this happens, all that will have been learned and developed throughout the ITER build will still have been worth the $100b price tag.

Edited February 6, 2018 by Bonam

Argus · February 8, 2018

Well, it is science like this which is going to address climate change, not stupid carbon taxes. I note almost every western country is involved in this, but don't see any sign Canada is.

?Impact · February 8, 2018

1 hour ago, Argus said:

Well, it is science like this which is going to address climate change, not stupid carbon taxes. I note almost every western country is involved in this, but don't see any sign Canada is.

There is a lot of fusion research going on in Canada at McMaster, UofT (Institute for Aerospace Studies), Queens, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, UQUaM, General Fusion, USask (Plasma Physics Lab), and U Alberta

OftenWrong · February 9, 2018

4 hours ago, ?Impact said:

There is a lot of fusion research going on in Canada at McMaster, UofT (Institute for Aerospace Studies), Queens, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, UQUaM, General Fusion, USask (Plasma Physics Lab), and U Alberta

Where did you get that information? There is very little going on in terms of serious fusion research at McMaster, Queen's or UOIT. I know this for a fact. I have met Hossam Gabar and his wife at a UNENE conference and we discussed his work. It is mainly theoretical. That is not to say there is nothing going on, but it's not much. Perhaps you re confusing research into Gen 4 fission reactor technology, which is much more prominent.

I am aware of the lab in BC that has a pretty cool looking machine on their web page, that's General Fusion. Others you mentioned, I'm not sure.

Bonam · February 9, 2018

8 hours ago, Argus said:

Well, it is science like this which is going to address climate change, not stupid carbon taxes. I note almost every western country is involved in this, but don't see any sign Canada is.

I'll give you my honest opinion as a bit of a fusion insider. I don't think fusion will ever be helpful to address climate change in the way that most people envision, for the simple reason that solar is getting cheaper so quickly. Unlike many other energy technologies, solar panels are just solid state, semiconductor-type products, and they follow a Moore's law like path for cost/performance. In another decade or two, no other power source will be competitive with solar for cost / $. Solar energy IS fusion energy, the reactor just happens to be a ways away. The energy storage problem for solar energy is so much simpler to solve than fusion energy that there's just no contest.

Even after fusion is developed, the problem is it will be hard to make cost effective, for a number of reasons.

1. The technology involved is fundamentally expensive compared to what you need for other large scale power plants. Even once all the science and engineering is done, you fundamentally need gigantic superconducting magnets, liquid helium cooling systems, exotic materials that can withstand intense neutron bombardment, dangerous radioactive gases, precision diagnostics for rapid feedback control, and advanced pulse power systems. Most of these require rare and expensive materials and precision manufacturing, and are fundamentally not necessary for any other large scale industrial process meaning that economies of scale will be doubtful.

2. The physics of fusion are such that the bigger the reactor, the easier it is to get to work. While ITER is targetting 500 MW of thermal power, the reality is that any large scale plant based on the ITER (tokamak) design would need to be >5 GW to be efficient, stable, and anywhere close to cost effective. Unfortunately, almost no electrical grid is designed to be able to distribute > 5 GW from individual sources. Instead, grids distribute power from multiple smaller reactors which rarely exceed 1 GW. To make effective use of fusion energy based on the ITER concept, national energy grids would have to be upgraded specifically for that purpose (although there are other fusion reactor designs that may work better at smaller scales), adding further to the cost.

3. In 20 years, well before fusion is close to ready for prime time, solar will be < $0.01/kWh.

All that said, fusion energy IS very important. Why? One simple reason: space. Fusion energy offers greater energy density and power density than any other energy source that we have a serious chance of putting into practical use this century. For both space power and space propulsion, fusion will offer new possibilities that are not otherwise achievable. Solar energy becomes much less effective in the outer solar system since you are farther from the Sun. While Mars might plausibly be colonized using solar energy, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn cannot be, and they are in many ways the more intriguing targets. Fusion energy even has high enough performance that interstellar journeys to some of the closest star systems become conceivable on human-relevant timescales, whereas without fusion the best you could do is thousands of years. Fusion energy will be the foundational technology of humankind's expansion off Earth.

And, in the meanwhile, fusion energy is of great interest for applications in naval reactors. Fission reactors pose proliferation and contamination risks that fusion ones would not, and for the military, as with space, the cost of a reactor in an aircraft carrier or submarine is not as important as it would be for a commercial application. Fusion even offers possible applications in aircraft propulsion though that is farther off.

The biggest help that fusion may be able to provide to help when it comes to emissions would be if fusion reactors become employed in trans-oceanic shipping. Shipping (on ships not on land) is responsible for 17% of worldwide emissions, and if you replaced all those oil powered ships with fusion reactors that would be a big help.

Edited February 9, 2018 by Bonam