What if I told you that even if everything goes perfectly by 2045, ITER is not a power plant, just a proof of principle? They would have to do further engineering to figure out how to effectively convert the heat generated into electricity.
ITER is not the route to an economical fusion reactor. The supporters have even stopped promoting it as such. It is now a research reactor. We may find out some novel information on how plasma behaves in a certain regime, but this data is not likely to be useful in building a future reactor. The amount of resources that have been diverted from fundamental fusion research to be spent pouring cement and building magnets is a tragedy. We should have a thousand $3 million dollar or a hundred $30 million dollar experimental reactors, not this monstrosity.
Scale is everything for fusion (plasma). ITER is very important, as it represents the current most likely way. (Hence the name.)
That said, it's big, design by committee, slow, meticulous, etc.
It's not a fail fast market-driven experiment.
Also, most of the money is spent on the fundamentals, planning, developing operational knowhow, basic material science and plasma vessel engineering.
All in all, it could be better, but at least ITER is actually being built. MIT's ARC is still somewhere between "secured funding for a scaled down prototype" and actually will build something. Though it's great news, that they got funding (from Eni, an Italian energy company).
No. Q is everything in fusion. Scale is one way to improve Q in a Tokamak. The problem with improving Q by increasing scale is that it makes the reactors uneconomical. A reactor the size of ITER cannot ever be economically viable, even was capable of producing massive amounts of electricity.
Luckily, scaling up is not the only way to increase Q. The better way is to use more powerful magnetic fields.
Unfortunately, even with higher magnetic fields, DT fusion is unlikely to ever be practical. That's because the power density of the reactors is inherently limited by wall loading and minimum size considerations from neutron cross sections.
Look at the numbers. The power density of a PWR fission reactor core is 100 MW/m^3. If you consider the volume of the primary reactor vessel instead, it's 20 MW/m^3.
The power density of ITER is 0.05 MW/m^3 (counting gross fusion power). Even if you just include the volume of the plasma, it's 0.6 MW/m^3.
What about higher field concepts like MIT's ARC reactor? If you look at the paper on arxiv where details are given, the power density is 0.5 MW/m^3 -- 40 times worse than a PWR.
The low power density is devastating to the economic case for fusion. Magnetic fusion reactors will be complex, expensive things, with superconducting magnets, complex cooling systems, breeding blankets, heating and control systems. They will be much more expensive per unit mass or volume than a simple PWR reactor vessel. And much of that complex system will need to be periodically replaced due to neutron damage. If the power density is 40x worse they cannot possibly compete.
Yes, (SP)ARC is better than ITER. But ITER is so horribly bad that a reactor can be an order of magnitude better and still not have any real chance of competing.
Well, from a 2016 article on ARC they say cost 4 to 5 billion USD, output to the grid 200MW, which is not competitive with existing reactors but that would be the first one producing power built, the designs may improve. (https://www.computerworld.com/article/3028113/sustainable-it...)
Agreed. Aneutronic fusion is the end goal and the real prize in the fusion game, and we're very very far from that. Yet with just waiting for it, we'll never get closer.
And of course eventually clean (as in proper reprocessing/recycling) fission energy would be great too, but that again is stalled, largely due to nuclear armament proliferation concerns.
Because size (and complexity) directly correlate with cost. So unless fusion can enable cost reduction elsewhere, if the nuclear island is inherently larger, more complex, and hence more expensive than in a fission plant, power from it will be more expensive than from a fission plant. And in that case, why would any utility want one? New and risky (in the sense of having a significant chance of not working as well as hoped) technologies like fusion will be adopted only if they are significantly less expensive than more proven alternatives.
The size and complexity also directly affect reliability. There is more to go wrong in a fusion reactor than in a fission reactor, and repairing anything there will be difficult because hands-on work will be impossible.
Scale is not everything. There are types of fusion that would not build such huge monstrosities.
We should look at a broader range of ways to do fusion and then finance the ones most likely to work.
As you said, most of the money on ITAR is hardly directly related to fusion. A few companies get lots of money to do research to hit very specific performance that are specific to ITAR. The problem is this does not really build a broad range of companies that work in fusion.
It was simply to early to engaged in such a huge project especially because the technologies are evolving so fast outside of the project and some parts of the design are already not up to date 20 years before it will really be ready.
The research I've seen planned isn't about plasma physics - it's about material properties, lithium blanket designs, and lots of other finicky engineering details that will be necessary for actual practical reactors of different designs.
While those are all important, I thought that the main research goal of Iter was to understand the stability of the plasma for sustained net-energy operation. Aren't there still some remaining open questions about operating a D-T tokomak reactor to produce energy, like, does the plasma begin to rip itself apart after 1ms, okay, how about 10 seconds, how about 500 seconds, and so-on.
I accept that I'm talking based on extremely vaguely remembered statements from many years ago...
After all, if the goal was really these ancillary things you mention, many of them could be studied in other environments.
I would say that ITER has no potential to really point the way for fusion energy, it’s an international boondoggle born of Cold War/Post Cold War nuclear politics. As a vehicle for real science and engineering it’s bollocks. The real, slow, incremental research is being done elsewhere. We’re so far from a viable fusion plant rather than a test reactor that it isn’t even funny. So many basic problems (such as what you’ve outlined) remain unsolved even in a laboratory context, never mind the context of a large plant that would need to operate more or less continuously.
There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how hard problems get solved - you tinker with them until a new understanding and clever ideas emerge. Then you build new and better things based on those ideas, and continue tinkering with them. Etc etc.
Some things are so complex, like nuclear fusion and the Standard Model of physics, you have to build big complex things like tokamaks and particle colliders to be able to tinker with them. No one should be surprised or put out by that, it’s part of the process.
The problem with this argument is that in engineering, the goal is not just to get something that works, it's to get something that works better than the alternatives.
That means it's inescapable that there will be losers, regardless of how much is invested. There's no guarantee that fusion will win this competition, and good reasons to think it won't. Fusion may well go into the bin (with lighter than air passenger aircraft, superconducting digital computers, and MHD coal powerplants) of technologies that just couldn't cut it.
Possibly, but it’s way too early to give up on fusion now, especially considering its benefits - clean fuel, clean byproducts, less risk of meltdown and similar disaster vs fission.
Actually, it's long past time to give up on fusion, at least DT fusion. It's been known since at least the 1980s it would have lousy power density. DT fusion's putative advantages don't make up for that, nor for its grave operating issues (frequent replacement of major components and serious reliability/repairability problems.)
Whatever happened to the German stellarator? Seem to recall Merkel being present for one of the first tests a few years back, ITER seems to get more coverage
It's not, however, something that designed to directly head toward fusion power itself but instead to better understand components that could be improved to make fusion power.
In addition now with fusion there are heap of companies trying to get fusion power going in about a decade or so. Probably the most interesting of which are:
Who are both using new developments in high temperature superconducting tape fabrication to increase the magnetic field to get to fusion faster than ITER.
There was some interesting and encouraging info out of Korea's KSTAR tokamak recently: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180910111302.h... - the team there have been working on stabilising the plasma inside tokamaks, and have had pretty good success by the sounds of things.
General Fusion recently gave up on their original design (a spheromak-type plasma inside an imploding liquid metal vortex.) Instead, they're going to a spherical tokamaka where liquid metal compresses the plasma from the outside.
In this new concept, there is now a solid wall on the inside that is not shielded from the plasma by a thick layer of liquid metal. That means power density limits due to limits on wall loading will apply to their reactor, just as they do to conventional DT magnetic fusion reactor schemes. So, the major theoretical engineering advantage of their idea has been lost.
I don't understand anything to fusion (except basic stuff), but I like these : https://lppfusion.com/
They publish results often and it's quite entertaining.
ITER always gets more coverage of non-news about the project because it has had a lot more years to get good at that (getting the word out, not making fusion, that is). We'll probably get 3 different other projects to reach fusion before ITER accomplishes that.
They're working on different problems - Wendelstein is working on cheaper and smaller plasma containment, while ITER is focused on operations and materials properties.
The Royal Society held a two day conference 6 months ago if anyone is interested. They’ve posted the audio files, video would have been nicer but audio is handy;
Most mainstream physicists believe that the polywell design cannot work due to bremsstrahlung and electron cusp losses, as described by Rider. [0] Bussard and some of his followers have argued against some assumptions made in the Rider paper, but as far as I know, no one has found any loopholes big enough to allow a practical, power-producing reactor.
If you're interested in alternative fusion reactor designs, though, you might want to look into the levitated dipole. [1] There is a lot of evidence suggesting that this design avoids most of the major problems that plague tokamak development. [2][3] The remaining obstacles (as far as I can tell, mainly interchange instabilities and engineering difficulties) don't seem insurmountable to me. MIT made a serious attempt to build a levitated dipole reactor in the late 2000's, but unfortunately, the US Department of Energy cut off all funding in 2011.
I've been occasionally following the team that continued Bussard's work and they claim they can prove they can make it work in a couple years for a few million or something.
- Small, incremental, predictable improvements, due to more accurate modelling, tighter tolerances, bigger budgets, etc.
- Big breakthroughs, usually on shoestring budgets.
The largest impact comes from the latter, but they're very rare and unpredictable. We might fund thousands of small projects over decades and see nothing particularly substantial.
Big budget projects are riskier, since we can't fund many of them. Hence these tend to be the first type of project: where we can be quite confident on the capabilities and outcomes, so we'll see some improvement; even though it might not be as promising as the possibilities claimed by umpteen smaller projects.
It's also easier for individual institutions, companies, countries, etc. to fund smaller projects themselves. There's no point wading through the politics required to pool resources into a large international collaboration, if we're just going to divide up those resources between a bunch of small projects anyway ;)
> The largest impact comes from the latter, but they're very rare and unpredictable. We might fund thousands of small projects over decades and see nothing particularly substantial.
But that is not the case in fusion. We had many advances in fusion by small companies.
> here's no point wading through the politics required to pool resources into a large international collaboration, if we're just going to divide up those resources between a bunch of small projects anyway ;)
I do understand the political problem. However still it could be collaboration for a contest, rather then organize this project as a multi country technical problem.
And I would even be happy with just 3-5 projects that get many, many billions in the end. I mean lets be honest, if it costs $20 billion (and lets be honest it will be way more) to develop it will never be economical anyway.
There are lots and lots of people who would be happy to get a couple million for some fusion projects. Others believe they could build a break even project with 10s millions. And we could reinforce projects that make rapid advancement.
It would also create a large fusion industry with different companies going into 'supplier' mode and so on.
> And I would even be happy with just 3-5 projects that get many, many billions in the end. I mean lets be honest, if it costs $20 billion (and lets be honest it will be way more) to develop it will never be economical anyway.
> There are lots and lots of people who would be happy to get a couple million for some fusion projects. Others believe they could build a break even project with 10s millions. And we could reinforce projects that make rapid advancement.
Many people believe many things. There's a reason we do ITER: It has the best chance to actually work, unlike all the "cheap" 'hey, I'm a genius, I can do it with far less money!' projects out there.
Its a wildly expensive science project that produces far less science and far more overhead and waste.
And as we have already established, for such a long project it gets overtaken by technology.
And the 'powerstation' will cost billions upon billions more and it will still not even be close to economical.
> Many people believe many things. There's a reason we do ITER: It has the best chance to actually work, unlike all the "cheap" 'hey, I'm a genius, I can do it with far less money!' projects out there.
By what definition of 'work'? They might manage to get break even if they throw enough money at it. But if you had said, any project that shows break even can get 1 billion. That would be an effective use of money.
An I'm not saying any of these projects should get 20 billion because they think they are smarter. But how about getting 2 million and if you show impressive results you get 20 million and then maybe 200 million.
We've had many advances? We don't have fusion energy or anything close to it, so if we have many advances those are very, very small.
Maybe fusion won't matter anyway. If it arrives too late, power usage will have been restructured to fit the unreliability of sun/wind/minor power generation, and fusion's ability to provide steadily is something that users have learned to do without. Learned at great cost.
We have absolutely not learned how to do without, that's a waste over estimation. Many places already have problems with the variety and those are still a tiny part of overall generation.
And the advances in theory are actually incredibly important if you want to build an actual plant.
But then again, for stable power fission does basically everything fusion does for you. The difference between fission and fusion are tiny compared to chemical energy.
Intermittent, but very cheap when available, power sources ruin the market for baseload, even if they can't cover 100% of the power demand. When they ARE available, they crash the price of power. Baseload sources depend on the market being there most of the time to pay back their costs.
High capital cost systems, like what fusion reactors will be, are ruined economically if they can only charge a lot only a small fraction of the time. They will find it impossible to compete against sources with low capital cost but high operating cost (like, say, turbines operated off hydrogen produced at times of low power prices). The latter may have horrible round trip efficiency, but that won't matter.
"And the advantages in theory..."
What advantages are those? Fusion has inherent DISadvantages that are fundamental, most importantly low volumetric power density compared to fission reactors.
For baseload yes, but it increase the price for dispatch-able energy.
There batteries, nuclear, gas and so on will compete.
> High capital cost systems, like what fusion reactors will be
That is not necessary true. Look at aneutronic fusion for example.
> What advantages are those? Fusion has inherent DISadvantages that are fundamental, most importantly low volumetric power density compared to fission reactors.
I was talking about advances in the theocratic understanding of plamsa and how fusion happens.
What I wrote was that power uses may well have learned to do without by the time fusion energy becomes available. AFAICT that might happen sometime after 2050, maybe closer to 2100.
Assume that energy users do not learn to cope with just renewables. In that case CO₂ emissions go as at present, ie. the CO₂ content in the atmosphere increases by about 2.25ppm/year. In 2050 that works out to about 500ppm and in 2100 to 600ppm (these are conservativish numbers, since they assume that the 2.25ppm/year stays flat while in reality it has been increasing steadily).
ITER is not thought to lead all the way to fusion power; at least one more round of experiments is required afterwards. The Wikipedia page mentions 2035, so assuming that the next round also takes 20 years and only one more round is necessary, the first actual fusion reactors could start construction around 2055, and large amounts of fusion power could perhaps be available around 2075 or 2095, when CO₂ content is 550-600ppm. This is absurdly high, therefore the assumption is untenable.
I'm tempted to agree with you that putting all that money into ITER when we're not even sure if that's the right way might seem like putting all your eggs in the same basket but at the same time I think it's a fallacy to consider this a zero-sum game. ITER already cost over 14 billion dollars which is a huge amount of money but almost negligible when compared to, say, the defense budget of the countries contributing to ITER. The Sochi winter olympics cost $51 billions. Or to compare to something more relevant, the amount of money "wasted" fighting the consequences of global warming is going to explode in the next decades, a few dozen billions are going to be cheap change compared to that.
So I agree that we should probably pump more money into more projects when it comes to nuclear research but I don't think it means that we should take it from ITER.
Some goals do but many projects with much less money have achieved impressive results in fusion with far, far less money. Fusion is very much an exploration of different methods and we focus 99% research on one approach.
