
ITER fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050 - tpatke
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-40558758
======
philipkglass
Some countries have formally committed to eliminating power from nuclear
fission. Most have not. Most countries have at least some regions that would
be happy to accept the good, stable employment and tax base offered by a
nuclear power plant in exchange for the very slight risk of accidents. So why
aren't more fission power plants getting built in countries where they are
_not_ formally excluded? I believe the single greatest factor is that they
take too long to build and require too large a lump of money, because a single
modern reactor is too big.

Modern Generation III/III+ reactor designs have actually made this
"chunkiness" worse; there's no modern reactor design under 500 MWe that's
certified in the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, or the EU. Designs in that
lower power range were built decades ago, and a few still run, but now it's
big-or-nothing. AP1000 and EPR are 1117 and 1600 MWe, respectively, and all
projects using them are behind schedule/over budget. And since these large
projects are leading to such poor outcomes for involved companies, it will be
difficult to get follow-on orders that will benefit from the hard earned
lessons of their initial builds.

Even if all the technical problems are solved and fusion proves capable of
producing net electricity, fusion power risks hitting this same too-big-to-
build problem afflicting fission if it can't scale down. If the only
approaches that work are enormous tokamaks with an entry level price of
$10-billion-or-more, then they'll be engineering marvels that hardly anyone
builds. Maybe they'll someday supply 10% of China's electricity.

~~~
21
Fission was killed by Fukushima. While in theory we can build safe reactors,
practice shows otherwise.

~~~
Aron
We've certainly shown that reactors designed in the 60s and built in the 70s
are problematic in very rare cases.

~~~
logicallee
Like the sibling commenter, I can't parse your sentence and intention except
as "we've certainly shown they're not _commonly_ problematic" which is quite a
weak statement.

Is your sentence a positive sentence (do you mean we've certainly shown
they're problematic essentially never) or is your sentence negative (we've
certainly shown they're problematic definitely sometimes - which is
unacceptable)?

I tried to read your attitude but failed.

~~~
Aron
I was mostly rebuffing the structure of the argument "While in theory we can
build safe reactors, practice shows otherwise" which has two different
reference classes for reactors (modern safer ones, and less safe fukushima
ones).

~~~
logicallee
Oh, okay! It was confusing because it sounds like "they're rarely problematic"
which is not your meaning. Thanks for the clarification!

------
cletus
The article mentions one big issue: plasma containment. It doesn't even
mention what I think of as being the biggest hurdle to commercial fusion power
generation: neutron containment.

Fusion hydrogen requires heavy isotopes, namely tritium, to generate
sufficient reactions. This generates s lot of free neutrons however, enough
that they will tend to destroy what container they're in. This is a
significant, possibly commercially insurmountable, engineering problem.

Helium-3 is one alternative but is super rare on Earth ( even the heavier
Helium-4 escapes the Earth's gravity once it reaches the atmosphere (so party
balloons are consuming an irreplaceable resource thanks to an effective
subsidy from Congress who narrowmindedly decided to offload the Strategic
Helium Reserve at submarket rates).

People like to bandy about phrases like "free energy" when it comes to fusion.
Well, free fuel and free energy aren't the same thing. A plant has a capex and
running costs, a finite lifetime and a power output. Put those numbers
together and you have a base energy cost even with free and essentially
limitless fuel.

The article talks about producing tritium from lithium. Great. The demand for
batteries is already going to stretch the worlds lithium supply so that's
another advance we need.

~~~
oakwhiz
Is it possible to recycle old lithium batteries and extract tritium from that?

~~~
ph0rque
In fact, it's possible to recycle old lithium batteries into... new lithium
batteries.

------
DesiLurker
correction.. ITER & derivative based fusion is delayed NOT fusion itself.

Honestly I feel ITER is such a big boondoggle that its cannibalizing pretty
much all other fragments of research in fusion. for reference even based on
tokamak design MIT ARC is uses much higher T REBCO superconductor based
magnets that ITER cannot even adopt. which do you think has a better chance of
success? besides that there are multiple other efforts like German
stellarator, FRC based design by trialpha and even the opensource focus
fusion. IMO its much better to spread the resources into these efforts rather
than dumping a bunch of money into monstrosity like ITER and going back into
the lap of fossils for next 2 decades.

thinking about [lack of] fusion funding really pisses me off.

/end-rant

~~~
abefetterman
The other efforts you mention are much further from having Q>1 (energy
producing) fusion. FRCs and focus have not even reached Q=0.000001 and have
little theoretical basis for being power producing. Stellerators have their
own problems as well. Tokamaks have achieved Q=0.69, and so ITER has very
little risk of missing its goal of Q>1 if it does get constructed and run DT.

I agree that fusion is severely underfunded, and that it is dangerous for us
to put all our eggs in the Tokamak basket. And this article is pretty strange
for its fixation on DEMO which at this point might as well be made of unicorn
horns. But ITER was proposed and is supported by a huge number of scientists
for a good reason: it's the best way for us to hit a goal that fusion science
has been dreaming of for 50 years, that is key to understanding and designing
real fusion reactors.

~~~
IanCal
The ARC reactor is a tokamak design though, just (I appreciate the work this
word is doing in this sentence) smaller and with much more powerful magnets.
They quite explicitly want to not have a different type of reactor.

~~~
shaqbert
Problem w/ the ARC reactor is that it is just a design. The real life
engineering challenges are still daunting. E.g. for the supra conductors at
the Wendelstein 7-X, which provide a much less powerful magnetic field, just
assembling and connecting the supra conductor cables for each module was a
mind blowingly complex and fickle process that was described at length in this
(unfortunately German) super awesome podcast [0].

[0]: [http://alternativlos.org/36/](http://alternativlos.org/36/)

~~~
DennisP
Yes but stellarators are much more complicated to build than tokamaks. They
accept the construction difficulty in exchange for simpler plasma physics.

------
woodandsteel
So the people pushing fusion say it won't even start producing commercial
electricity until after 2050? But by then we will be all on renewables plus
cheap storage, or at least pretty close. What would the incentive be for
ripping that all out and replacing it with immensely costly fusion plants?

~~~
jerf
Footprint, probably. By then there will be a lot of people fairly crabby about
how much space the renewable infrastructure takes up. once people realize that
"an acre of solar panels" is an acre of land that we are taking all the energy
that Mother Nature uses to, you know, be Mother Nature.

You can see the first few faint traces of it today with complaints about
killing birds and such.

~~~
nine_k
Build solar where sun is abundant and space is unconstrained: in Sahara.

Quite a few technical challenges due to the sand, though.

~~~
lmm
And then you end up spending far more on powerlines than it would cost to get
working fusion.

~~~
sandl
Not really - ITER alone is expected to be in excess of $20 billion, that would
buy you about 20 modern HVDC Transmission lines, each with a length of 1000 km
and able to transmit 40 GW of power in total. That's a lot of power. :-)

[http://electrical-engineering-portal.com/analysing-the-
costs...](http://electrical-engineering-portal.com/analysing-the-costs-of-
high-voltage-direct-current-hvdc-transmission)

------
rbanffy
Considering the advances of renewables, both solar and in/off-shore wind, do
we really need fusion?

Most of the issues with current fission are political ("spent" fuel _can_ be
reprocessed) and economic (these beasts are insanely expensive to build and
operate safely) and we haven't even touched MSR's and Thorium. I get fusion
would be beautiful, but it has its problems too (heavy neutron bombardment
will eventually turn the reactor into a pile of hot nuclear waste - or, at
best, MSR fuel) and we may need to face the simple fact our technology isn't
up to _that_ challenge just yet.

Although stellarators may offer some shortcuts.

Maybe we'll need fusion for multi-generation starships supposed to operate for
many centuries on a closed loop system, but that need seems a bit too far into
the future for us to concern ourselves too much with it. Solar should be fine
up to Mars and compact fission should be enough up to the Oort cloud.

~~~
lmm
Renewables can't provide power where it's needed, and largely can't provide
reliable baseline power (hydroelectric being the exception, but it causes huge
environmental damage in terms of both direct flooding and disruption to
downstream ecosystems).

Fission could power us for 100-200 years at current consumption rates -
substantially less if consumption continues to grow. It's not time to panic
yet, but we can't afford not to be doing fusion research.

~~~
rbanffy
> can't provide power where it's needed

I grew up with energy generated by a mix of hydro from 800km away and nuclear
from 200km. An off-shore wind farm could be built anywhere between 100 and
250km from my city. In-shore wind, if distributed and connected, can provide a
lot of reliable with little need for constant hydro or nuclear.

Also, hydro can be rather helpful in other aspects - it can be a store of
drinking water, fisheries and agriculture. The environmental impact is, of
course, huge, buy far more benign than the current fashion of fossils. Plus,
if you are really clever, you can use it to host carbon-fixating algae you can
bury to remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere.

Mind you that fission's environmental impact is not restricted to those rare
occasions when everything goes bad and the reactor melts down. Mining for
fissiles is not exactly environment friendly.

And while local photovoltaic may have some nasty industrial processes
involved, solar-thermal doesn't. It also provides a nice and smooth generation
pattern that can cover for baseline generation.

~~~
lmm
> I grew up with energy generated by a mix of hydro from 800km away and
> nuclear from 200km.

Impressive, but those grids aren't cheap, and their maintenance is only
getting more expensive with modern safety standards and labour costs.

> Also, hydro can be rather helpful in other aspects - it can be a store of
> drinking water, fisheries and agriculture. The environmental impact is, of
> course, huge, buy far more benign than the current fashion of fossils.

Anything but coal is progress, sure. But hydro is still damaging enough that
it's well worth replacing.

> Mind you that fission's environmental impact is not restricted to those rare
> occasions when everything goes bad and the reactor melts down. Mining for
> fissiles is not exactly environment friendly.

The fuel density of fissiles is so high that that's not really an issue though
- the amount of fuel mining needed is tiny.

> And while local photovoltaic may have some nasty industrial processes
> involved, solar-thermal doesn't. It also provides a nice and smooth
> generation pattern that can cover for baseline generation.

Solar-thermal has potential, but it still has some time/storage issues (yes it
doesn't go to zero immediately at dusk, but it's not entirely aligned with
demand either, and e.g. seasons are a big issue further from the equator) and
location issues.

Ultimately while conventional renewables will be part of the mix - maybe a big
part - it's hard to imagine we won't have cases where we need reliable,
consistent power in a specific arbitrary location, and nuclear is really the
only viable clean power source that can offer that. Maybe storage tech will
improve to the point where that's no longer the case, but we can't rely on
that - at least, not the extent of closing off nuclear research. The cost of
the likes of ITER is a drop in the bucket compared to the world's total energy
expenditure.

~~~
graphitezepp
Not to sound like a fossil shill, but I want to agree with "anything but coal
is progress" and suggest that natural gas, done sufficiently cleanly and only
for demand curve smoothing, could be part of a 'good enough' solution in the
near future.

------
fcanesin
"DEMO fusion reactor pushed beyond 2050" would be a much more honest headline.

------
Nihilartikel
Shees... I really wish they would cancel it already. All technical and
scientific concerns aside, the patient is already dead of cost sickness, and
is only kept alive by pumping money into its scabrous leaking veins.

If they took even 1/10th of the money and spread it around some of the more
promising, smaller, non-tokamak, scrappier fusion projects like tri-alpha,
polywell, or the Lockheed skunkworks one that actually have a plausible path
to power generation I think that the money would make a better impact. Even
next gen fission would be a better investment. India and China are doing very
nice things with thorium these days... Too bad they'll never turn off the pork
faucet until forced.

~~~
the8472
> that actually have a plausible path to power generation

Those other approaches are far less proven than the ITER design (through its
precursors like JET). I'm not saying that some of them won't outpace ITER
eventually, but as far as things go that are actually being built ITER is
still ahead of the pack.

------
archiidus
2 relevant podcast episodes from the great science and engineering podcast
omega tau. Podcasts/interviews with people close to the work.
[http://omegataupodcast.net/22-nuclear-fusion-at-mpi-fur-
plas...](http://omegataupodcast.net/22-nuclear-fusion-at-mpi-fur-
plasmaphysik/) [http://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-
iter/](http://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-iter/)

------
dest
lets hope this international collaboration will survive through the decades,
and that no war or political chaos will stop it.

~~~
jostmey
Funny, but war sometimes accelerates specific technologies. The atomic age was
brought about by WWII. I'm not saying war is good... the advances at one field
can come at the expense of scientific research across a broad number of other
fields

~~~
dest
You have a point, but for controlled fusion the applications look only civil
to me. Military application/uncontrolled fusion/H bomb already exists!

------
sverige
2050? Maybe they can run their systems on GNU Hurd then.

(</sarcasm> I've been hearing how fusion reactors are "just around the corner"
since I was a teenager, at least 40 years now.)

~~~
nategri
That's actually a standard joke in fusion research: "Always 20 years away."

Although it looks like they're updating their model to be more accurate, as
now it appears to be "Always 30 years away."

------
Aron
"It is an international project with seven partners: China, the European
Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States."

Found the problem.

------
cleansy
There are already some more or less successful fusion reactors out there like
Wendelstein [1] with a way smaller budget (~€1B) and that are already
completed. Why does ITER need such a huge budget, long time to completion and
the involvement of 7 countries/organizations to essentially proof the point of
fusion energy? As far as I understood ITER is not meant to be commercially
viable.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X)

EDIT: originally I wrote 195 countries, which is BS of course :)

~~~
pantalaimon
Wendelstein-7X is not a fusion machine, it's only a test for the plasma vessel
design.

~~~
DennisP
High school kids build fusors in their garages, fuse deuterium, and get
neutron counts. Wendelstein certainly will as well. It'd be very silly not to,
and if you look at their technical specs, you'll see that the fuel will
include deuterium, at over 100M degrees, enough for plenty of fusion
reactions.

[http://www.ipp.mpg.de/16931/einfuehrung](http://www.ipp.mpg.de/16931/einfuehrung)

Their initial tests did not use deuterium, and that gave a lot of people the
wrong impression.

(For net power at this temperature they would need tritium, which they aren't
using. Tritium is expensive and hard to deal with, and most fusion projects
don't bother with it.)

~~~
nomercy400
Question by a noob: I heard they have 4 grams tritium diluted in ~770000 tons
of water in Japan. Can't we use/extract that if it is that valuable? Or isn't
it that hard to produce?

~~~
DennisP
I'm not sure but I think it'd be pretty hard to extract four grams of tritium
from 770000 tons of water.

The main issue with tritium isn't the expense of getting it, but the problems
you face in dealing with it. It's hydrogen with two extra neutrons; it's hard
to keep it from leaking and it's radioactive.

