
A Star in a Bottle – The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor - Thevet
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bottle
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jessriedel
When I read this article, I was blown away by this passage:

> Typically, outsiders cannot comprehend how the massive expenditures never
> manage to yield energy. Typically, insiders cannot comprehend how little is
> being invested in a project that presents such immense technical obstacles
> and also such potential. A graph commonly passed around among the
> insiders—an enduring scrap of twentieth-century budgetary ephemera—depicts
> the 1976 federal plan to build a working thermonuclear reactor. The graph
> tracks various scenarios for attaining fusion energy. The “maximum” effort,
> the most expensive up front, with initial spending as high as nine billion
> dollars a year, was projected to yield a reactor by 1990. The “moderate”
> effort, with spending never exceeding four billion dollars in a year, would
> take fifteen more years. The fusion community might be easy to criticize for
> its many unmet milestones, but for decades the United States has never come
> close to even the moderate effort. In 1977, when the American fusion budget
> was at its peak, government investment in the research, adjusted for
> inflation, was seven hundred million dollars; by 1991, this had fallen by
> more than half. It is now half a billion, not appreciably more than the
> Korean budget.

The chart was produced by Energy Research and Development Administration
(ERDA), which was later subsumed into the Department of Energy and presumably
represented the expert wisdom at the time. (Please correct me if you have info
that most experts were in fact more optimistic.) It can be found, in 1976
dollars, as figure 1 here:

[http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2...](http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2009/Who_Killed_Fusion.pdf)

I am having a hard time getting over the importance of this. For all the
discussion of global warming, energy prices, population crunches, etc., etc.,
fusion is always ignored as a solution for the simple reason that people think
it's unfeasibly costly. And they think that _only because they think it 's had
a history of being grossly more expensive than promised_. But if we've really
known how much it would cost to get commercial fusion power since 1976, then
this reasoning is completely faulty. So then if we just haven't spent the
modest amount of money on it...isn't this insane? Someone please tell me what
I'm missing.

~~~
rwallace
Not everyone thinks the problem is the R&D cost. I mean if that was the only
problem, then yes, I would agree, give them a blank check.

It's my opinion fusion just isn't a good way to generate power on the scale at
which 21st-century civilization operates (i.e. a fusion reactor wants to be
very much larger than a gigawatt) so we would be better off to forget about it
and spend the money on either fission (which can actually do everything fusion
promises except have emotional appeal - and I suspect the real source of the
emotional appeal of fusion power is that it exists only in people's
imagination) or if people won't politically accept fission, just keep working
on solar, wind and biofuels.

~~~
jessriedel
Are you arguing that we shouldn't pursue fission because we won't need as much
power in one place as is provided by efficient large-scale fusion designs?
Because that seems very weird to me. Power is _great_. Our civilization
thrives on power. The costs of making things energy efficient are large.

Now, the current thinking is that available power sources either cause harm
(fossil fuels) or are expensive and intermittent (renewables). And that
thinking is prudent. But if we can solve all this with fusion...that would be
fantastic! Think of all the things you could do if you had cheap power, and
all the regulations you could dispose of. Is your argument really that we
won't find a way to make use of cheap, clean power?

~~~
rwallace
Okay, so let's build a petawatt-scale fusion power plant. I can actually think
of practical ways to build one if it can be that large.

But that's not going to happen. A petawatt-scale fusion power plant is not
going to be economically or politically feasible this century, no matter what
progress we make on plasma physics and no matter how cheap it would be _per
watt_.

Every power source has a preferred scale. A fuel cell can be the size of a
mitochondrion, but a combustion engine, in order to be efficient, really wants
to be at least big enough for a lawnmower, and an efficient fission reactor
wants to be at least a good few megawatts.

My conjecture is that a fusion reactor wants to be at least a petawatt, and
even if we solve the plasma physics problems, a gigawatt fusion reactor will
cost _more_ per watt than the equivalent in solar plus appropriate attached
storage - which makes it pointless to work on fusion at this time.

~~~
jessriedel
Fair enough, I guess I just question your two premises. Can you link me to
anything that would support the Petawatt number? If China can make use of a 20
GW plant (the Three Gorges Dam) and the Congo can make use of a 40 GW plant
(the proposed Grand Inga Dam) at locations determined by nature, don't you
think that many countries on earth could make use of 100-1,000 GW plants with
significantly more freedom for location?

Thanks for your thoughts.

~~~
ufmace
I don't know whether the limit for economical fusion power is 1GW or 1TW or
1PW either. But if it turns out to be the higher side of that, then I'd be
leaning against it. Sure, we could use the power, but right now, our power
needs are low enough that we might build only one or two of them to run whole
countries or even continents off of. I don't really like the idea of having
One Huge Power Plant for most of a continent Seems too vulnerable to all sorts
of failure modes to me. Imagine if some important part deep in the machine
breaks because of some mistake somewhere, or even sabotage. The whole
continent's power could be down, and it might take weeks or months or longer
to make a new widget and get it installed, given that there's so little demand
for them with only a couple of plants.

------
bane
Tying two threads together

"So far, the vast machine exists only as 1.8 terabytes of digital
information..."

A 512GB SD card was on the front page here today, 4 of those would hold all
the plans for powering the planet for the next 30 million years. That's
basically the size of half a playing card.

After reading the article, I wonder if the real issue to building something
like this is as much a managerial science problem as it is a hard science
problem. Complex endeavors like this should be hotbeds of social science
research.

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jdiez17
Very rarely do I read every word in an article posted here, but this was one
of those times and I'm glad I did. The article itself was very well written.
You could feel the tension engineers must feel and the mind-numbing scale of
the project. I think it captured the atmosphere at ITER very well; a mix of
impending doom and unescapable existential claustrophobia counterpoised by a
sense of mission.

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uberstuber
Neat in-vessel assembly video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt70mO2nQac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt70mO2nQac)

~~~
chii
wow, that's some hugely complex build mechanism. A lot of the cost of building
it is going to go into the design, and manufacture of scaffolds, and custom
struts etc, just for the conveyor belt.

Would it have been cheaper to not have the assembly done in such a fashion?

~~~
adwf
From what I remember, they need absolutely crazy tight tolerances in every
single join and gap. Something like <0.1mm for _every_ component involved in
the reaction chamber. And it's huge too. Otherwise the whole thing will start
falling apart as soon as they turn it on. I imagine that's what's requiring
the unusual build mechanisms.

------
throwaway344
There has been a previous discussion, if interested, at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7291008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7291008)

------
FiatLuxDave
Excellent article. I worked in fusion years ago and I even learned a few
things about the politics of the ITER team that I did not know.

The comparison with Apollo or the Manhattan Project always comes up when
discussing ITER. I truly hope that when it all comes together, that it is more
of a Manhattan than an Apollo. The difference being, that once we built one
atomic bomb, we kept building more and more and now it seems we may never be
rid of them. Whereas with Apollo, we harnessed the political will to land on
the Moon (multiple times even!) but once the political will dropped away, so
did the path to the Moon, because Saturn Vs don't come cheap. If ITER ignites,
but does not result in a path to cheaper, commercial use of fusion energy,
then the next few generations may be in the same position with regards to
fusion energy as my generation has been to space exploration.

This is why I tend to fall in Bob Hirsch's camp with regards to the faster,
cheaper, smaller development of multiple fusion reactor concepts. Imagine if
instead of developing the Saturn V for Apollo, that NASA had gone for many
concepts from big rockets (e.g. Saturn V) to air launches (e.g. Pegasus) to
suborbital balloons (e.g. JP aerospace) to space guns (e.g. HARP). Sure, the
Russians would probably have beaten us to the Moon, but if a cheaper
alternative to space launch had been found back when it was a national
priority, we might have a Moonbase today.

The thing about gathering political will is that you have to have a clear
target. The dangerous thing in the case of ITER, is that once that target
(ignition) is achieved, the political will to do more beyond that goal may not
be there. And ITER ignition alone does not answer our energy issues.

~~~
dredmorbius
Is that Robert Hirsch of SAIC? References?

~~~
FiatLuxDave
Yes, that is correct. Long before he was known for his views on Peak Oil
(which I'm not really in agreement with), he was known for his work in fusion.
I find it interesting that his wikipedia page shows little detail about his
early career.

Here are some references:
[http://www.aero.umd.edu/html/sedwick/presentations/S9P1_Robe...](http://www.aero.umd.edu/html/sedwick/presentations/S9P1_Robert_Hirsch_Talk.pdf)

[http://www.issues.org/13.4/hirsch.htm](http://www.issues.org/13.4/hirsch.htm)

[http://fire.pppl.gov/fusion_critic_response_stacey.pdf](http://fire.pppl.gov/fusion_critic_response_stacey.pdf)
(section V)

------
ufmace
Found a current picture of the reactor:

[https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/img_galleries/final...](https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/img_galleries/final_pour_b2_270814_15_small.jpg)

The project's main website looks pretty cool too:

[https://www.iter.org/](https://www.iter.org/)

------
ufmace
Awesome article. But I gotta wonder - given the sheer size and cost of the
ITER reactor, it's hard to see how we'll ever be able to build a commercial
version of the reactor that's competitive with anything conventional. I don't
suppose anyone here has any insight on that?

~~~
keeperofdakeys
Besides the whole prototype status, ITER itself also has many problems which
conflate the cost (and time) required to build. Every country involved wants
to make a "significant" contribution, so you get many parts built in different
countries, which may need to tool themselves to build these parts, and that
need to later fit together. I even think one part had to be rejected because
it didn't fit the rest.

The scale is also crazy, inside the tokamak the magnets can push against each
other with forces twice that which the space shuttle's launch creates
[http://www.iter.org/newsline/269/1593](http://www.iter.org/newsline/269/1593)

Once ITER is built though, and if it works, then we'll have the knowledge, and
tooling required to make more of the parts to build a second (and that
knowledge and tooling is spread amongst many countries). The cost will
decrease a lot for the first few, and much more after.

------
nickodell
>Thirty-five countries, representing more than half the world’s population,
are invested in the project, which is so complex to finance that it requires
its own currency: the ITER Unit of Account.

Oh lord. This is a perfect example of a bike-shed problem. They couldn't agree
to use one country's currency or another, so now they're doing it in a totally
custom currency.

~~~
Terr_
> > so complex to finance that it requires its own currency

> This is a perfect example of a bike-shed problem.

I disagree, I think your post is a perfect example of the "anything I don't
understand outside my field must be easy" problem.

[http://xkcd.com/793/](http://xkcd.com/793/)

