Costs explode for Nuclear Fusion Flagship project -- Is it still worth the money?

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ITER for short, was supposed to be the world’s first nuclear fusion machine to generate net energy. But just last week, the project’s leadership announced another delay and another price hike. Is it still worth the money? And what does this mean for the future of nuclear fusion power?

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#science #sciencenews #technews #tech #technology

[DailyFrankPeter]

Makes me think of all the scrum meetings where I'm asked to estimate something that I've never done before, I don't know who has and it's not designed yet...

[Tehom]

IMO the biggest problem with ITER is that its slow iteration cycle gives it absolutely no way to test or work with recent developments. You mentioned stellarators, which hold a great deal of promise over tokamaks, but ITER can't do anything with that advancement because its design was set in stone 3 decades ago

[thepigdot]

When I was a teenager I went to JET and part of the tour included a section on ITER and I was excited to see what it could deliver for humanity. Now I'm 30 and it's still as far away as it was back then, it's never going to happen.

[shanent]

It's just unbelievable that mechanical tolerances are the problem here. Making parts that come from different sources fit together is a solved problem.

[Alphqwe]

Are we back to "Fusion is only 20 years away and always will be!"?

[rvq]

The way you pull off those subtle backhanded comments without any expression is just amazing 😂😂

[Pier-zlgm]

The physicist L J Reinders wrote two books, with self explanatory titles : The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion (Springer Nature, 2021, 652 pp); Sun in a Bottle? Pie in the Sky! The Wishful Thinking of Nuclear Fusion Energy (Springer, 2022, 352 pp). Both have been totally ignored by the physicist community (have you seen any review in their journals ?), so apt at turning a blind eye (or two..) to protect its collective interests.

[georgestreicher]

There are several companies bringing liquid fluoride salt thorium reactors to market. This will be the future of nuclear energy.

[gillishommen]

After doing a PhD on the engineering (sensors) side of nuclear fusion 10 years ago I left the field since I thought the concept was just wildly unpractical (tokamak, stellarator, inertial confinement, all of them), and several fundamental issues were not even beginning to be tackled (fuel cycle anyone?). I don't see how the incredible complexity and conflicting performance requirements of all the thousands subsystems and millions of components making up the machine are are ever going to lead to a practical, reliable, let alone affordable source of energy. Do realize that a stellarator is basically a tokamak with the complexity-dial turned up to eleven, and inertial confinement fusion is pretty much the US defense industry (H-bombs) pretending that might also lead to a powerplant some day... (spoiler; I wouldn't hold my breath)

I'm afraid that none of these delays and setbacks to ITER really surprise me. At the same time, I'm also highly skeptical of the various startups promising power production in a few (or at least less than 10) years. They all seem to focus on one of the many fundamental challenges of nuclear fusion, while just forgetting about all the other unsolved issues. Even putting all the startups together, there are still many unsolved issues. Of course you need to solve all of them to actually get to a working power plant...

In my opinion the money would be better spent on accelerating the energy transition with the technologies we have today, or at least are actually close to market.

[punkbutcher]

Correction: Stellarators might appear slimmer, but are not smaller than Tokamaks! (Though this is not the only relevant quantity)
Due to their very high aspect ratio (ratio of width to height, like with TVs) and the need for shielding of a given thickness to prevent the magnets from being destroyed by neutrons (about 1m) the major radius (machine centre to plasma centre) has to be at least 10m, while ITER has 6m only, and current DEMO designs go for 6-8m, depending on the magnetic field. Therefore Stellarators need more superconducting material, which is the biggest cost contributor. Higher magnetic fields will not save Stellarators, because the plasma needs a certain thickness, say 1m radius, so that the whole machine has to be scaled to huge proportions.
The shown W7X has a major radius of 5m and a minor radius of 0.5m (aspect ratio 10), so scaling this up you would end up at least with 15m major radius. Adding 1m plasma, 1m shielding, the coils and cryostat the outer diameter will be about 40m.

[RealNovgorod]

Dude, inertial confinement is just a thermonuclear weapons test. You need on the order of 100x more power to drive the lasers than what you get from the fusion.

[Wizardess]

Been reading Terry Pratchett lately? Actually "It's turtles all the way down." - until it was discovered the turtle was swimming through empty space with the elephants on top of it and ....
{^_-}

[Frrk]

In engineering, parts with defects come in all the time. You contact the supplier, they fix it or send a new one. But I suppose it's a bit different when you're dealing with a mm-precision 450-tonne vessel section hand-welded in Korea...

[adriang]

Personally I think measuring the "difficulty" of a closed system in stacked elephants should be a new SI unit 🤣

[VacuumTube]

"Hot Fusion is the technology of the future because it will never see the present" [Emilio Del Giudice]

[dan]

Surpise surpirse, fusion without the gravity of a star is very expensive. Thermodynamics always wins. The energy required to generate fusion is likely to always be more than the energy that can be extracted. To be economic the energy extracted needs to be about 20 times more than the total energy input.

[joyl]

3:42 actual sci-fi character Data popping up made my day lol

[duggydo]

When I was the head of an engineering team, I learned quickly that the QA/QC could almost never be overdone. Not finding and correcting mistakes early almost always have massive repercussions. It sounds like the acceptable tolerances were wrong or weren’t checked. Most of the time they just aren’t checked.

[ernstmullner]

Being old enough to remember - in the early 197ies, we were told that fusion reactors 20 years away. 50 years later, it is still the same. 😅

[zygmuntwaligora]

They are investing enormous amounts of money into something that may never yield a stable positive energy balance. The first tokamak was built in Moscow in 1956, and over nearly 70 years, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on all these devices, with essentially no result. It is worth noting that in stars, fusion occurs in a completely different way, i.e., under the influence of immense pressure, the fusion of nuclei into heavier elements takes place.