
ITER is a showcase  for the drawbacks of fusion energy - okket
https://thebulletin.org/iter-showcase-drawbacks-fusion-energy11512
======
pablobaz
ITER is not a power station it is a research project.

In other news Wright brothers first plane unsuitable for transatlantic
business travel. Colossus struggles to run Call of Duty.

~~~
majewsky
I had that same criticism in my head while reading the first half of the
article that mainly discusses the energy use of the project. That criticism
was dispelled in the second half where fundamental problems with fusion
reactors are discussed.

This article will certainly not cause me to dismiss fusion as a potential
energy source outright, but it makes it very clear that even with ITER up and
running, we are nowhere near being able to use fusion for energy generation.
[1]

To pick up your analogy: It took only 1-2 decades to get from the Wright
brothers to commercial aircrafts. In that sense, ITER looks more akin to one
of Da Vinci's flying machines.

[1] Which makes me wonder about the buzz about Lockheed-Martin's skunkworks
fusion projects.

~~~
DennisP
All the size objections at least are just due to ITER being an obsolete
design. MIT's ARC would use the same plasma physics and would have the same
power output, but in a 10X smaller package by using modern superconductors.

There are also lots of alternative designs (including LM's); they have higher
scientific risk because the plasma physics isn't understood as well, but may
be more practical if they work out.

~~~
AlanSE
This is a good point, thank you for bringing it up.

I watched a talk by one of the MIT people on this, and their case is
tremendously compelling. This is particularly true when you compare it to the
pitfalls of the ITER project.

At some point, your megaproject is just too flawed and too out of date to make
sense on its own. ITER's consumption of Tritium may do more to damage the
future of fusion power than what it offers in terms of understanding of the
plasma.

Sure, the newer designs are risky, but how is ITER not risky? Any decent risk
analysis needs to look at things in terms of alternatives. I think ITER will
give important knowledge in terms of plasma physics, I just cannot begin to
fathom how that is worth the 10s of Billions and waiting 2 decades to get it.

The tragedy of megaprojects comes in the form of opportunity cost.

~~~
Retric
ITER is about farm more than just plasma physics. Tritium breeding from
lithium is critical for any D-T reactor design and requires taking the vessel
apart remotely and processing the blanket because of it's half life. That's
just one of the many things involved and why you want a 'safe' design.

~~~
DennisP
ARC handles breeding by using FLiBe, a molten salt coolant containing lithium.
No disassembly required to harvest the tritium.

~~~
Retric
You can't really use liquids around plasma. You can try to have liquid lithium
behind inside a solid container, but wall thickness directly relates to wall
lifetime _AND_ you want the thinnest walls possible to maximize tritium
production.

Worldwide Tritium production is on the order of 1 lb per year, that's not
going to cut it when you want to scale up.

~~~
DennisP
There's a solid inner reactor wall. It's 3-D printed and replaced once a year;
the reactor has a modular design that makes it easy to do that.

~~~
Retric
Exactly, _replaced once a year_ that's easy to write but very hard to actually
accomplish.

Just like ITER it's extremely radioactive during that process, so you need to
handle all of that remotely and your reactor design must be capable of both
opening and closing regularly.

Sure, it does not seem as sexy as superconductors, plasma, etc but it's a
surprisingly hard problem.

PS: My point about not scaling up Tritium production just means reactor
designs need to be net possessive Tritium producers, which is why the walls
need to be thin and swapped out regularly.

~~~
DennisP
One thing that makes it relatively easy to open the reactor is that the
superconducting tapes can have joints without significant resistance, instead
of being a continuous wrapping. They've tested the joints to make sure of
this.

Here's a rendering showing how the reactor is put together:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efOlmF3wjJE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efOlmF3wjJE)

------
sddfd
ITER is a research project. As with all research, its main purpose is
discovery of "incidental knowledge" , i.e. things you did not set out to
research, but are important to know for future projects in the direction. ITER
has between 1000 and 5000 highly qualified workers and scientists on site. The
experience these people gain during the project can hardly be expressed in
USD.

Furthermore, many companies gain experience in manufacturing parts for ITER -
experience that might be useful for other projects in the future too.

Lastly, many different players collaborate in ITER so the whole of things is
also a management experiment.

~~~
bambax
> _a management experiment_

Really? Billions and billions of Euros, hundreds of thousand of metric tons of
concrete, hundreds of MW of power, thousands of gallons of fresh water-per-
minute, tends of thousands of nuclear waste, to run a "management
experiment"?? This has to be the most ludicrous, expensive and ill-designed
case study in the history of mankind.

Also, it seems the word "experiment" is inadequate. An experiment requires

1/ a theory and an expectation of what should happen

2/ a rigorous, controlled and replicable setup, where you test the theory and
compare the actual result to the expected one

Having many people from different nations working together does not qualify as
a "experiment"; maybe it's an experience, or a happening (like a concert).
It's the Woodstock of science; it must certainly be fun for all involved but
it's unlikely humanity will make much progress because of it.

~~~
Jedd
> > a management experiment

This is a disingenuous quote -- the parent said 'so the whole of things is
also a management experiment'.

You then go on to attack that decontextualised fragment by saying:

> Really? Billions and billions of Euros, hundreds of thousand of metric tons
> of concrete, hundreds of MW of power, thousands of gallons of fresh water-
> per-minute, tends of thousands of nuclear waste, to run a "management
> experiment"?? This has to be the most ludicrous, expensive and ill-designed
> case study in the history of mankind.

And I'd suggest:

metric _tonnes_

hundreds of MW

thousands of imperial measurements of water that are re-usable

tends <sic> of thousands of nuclear waste ... means what, precisely?

refer you again to the 'also' runs a management experiment

This clearly is _not_ the most ludicrous, expensive, and ill-designed case
study in the history of mankind, no matter how the coal industry wishes to
describe it.

~~~
bambax
Sorry for the typos.

I fail to see how the "coal industry" reference applies to me however, or
indeed, critics of this mammoth project that makes absolutely no sense.

I'm French and have been listening to politicians telling us the billions of
Euros spent, and tons (why tonnes?) of concrete in an otherwise nice region
would transform the production of energy, for most of my adult life.

As I've always suspected, that's complete BS, as the article makes clear. Why
people who are not politicians would want to defend ITER, I don't know.

------
maxharris
Thanks to some brilliant people, as well as advances in superconducting
materials, MIT has a better plan than ITER, for a fraction of the budget:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4)

~~~
ZenoArrow
It should be noted that all non-tokamak approaches to nuclear fusion offer
cheaper costs than ITER. Tokamaks like ITER are an outlier when it comes to
projected/actual costs. I'm going to avoid listing my personal favourite
fusion project yet again on HN, but what I will say is ITER is not the only
game in town, and there's lots of promising research being done into non-
tokamak designs.

~~~
DennisP
I agree, but will mention that MIT's plan is a tokamak. But it's ten times
smaller, because they use new, commercially-available high temperature
superconducting tapes that weren't around when ITER was designed. This lets
them use a much stronger magnetic field. (MIT doesn't have funding for it but
the private company Tokamak Energy is doing something similar.)

MIT's design is also easy to take apart, has a 3-d printed reactor core that
gets replaced once a year, and surrounds that with FLiBe, the same molten salt
used in some fission designs, for cooling and tritium breeding.

~~~
XorNot
It's also all a design, and you'd be a fool to believe any upfront cost-
projections are going to be hit.

ITER was not as expensive as it is back when it was designed either, but
building things which have never been built before is full of risk.

In a sane world, we'd be funding both and probably more, seeing as how fusion
power is basically one of the single most important technologies we could
perfect in the modern age.

~~~
DennisP
True, but we _have_ built working tokamaks like JET, which is about the same
size as MIT's design, so it's not like the numbers come out of thin air
either.

------
epistasis
When you start comparing the $20B cost for ITER versus "big" projects like the
human genome, which took $1B over a similar time scale, ITER really does seem
like a boondoggle. It's sucking up massive amounts of research dollars and
attention on scientific/engineering goals that don't necessarily even move in
the right direction! Suppose they succeed; then what? What has been learned
that can spur the next $20B? Will the next tokamok take an order of magnitude
less money to produce, like the next genome did the day after the first was
released?

Big projects always use ridiculous and deceptive hype, but "unlimited energy"
takes that to a new level, IMHO.

~~~
Jedd
It's possible that your assessment is predicated on the idea that all
advancement can be reduced to $-values, normalised over large time spans.

My feeling -- undeniably hard to substantiate -- is that this is a difficult
position to defend _or_ attack.

~~~
epistasis
I'm certainly not reducing the _advancement_ to dollar values. In contrast,
the expenditure necessarily must be evaluated in money and time, and it's an
age old problem: who gets the research allocations?

The advancements are often unknown, but even if the genome project hadn't had
the side effect of spinning off a massive amount of technology, the end
product would be a significant advancement that would have accelerated all
manner of biological research. This was biology's biggest project ever, and it
is massively dwarfed by the boondoggles of physics.

In contrast, what can we learn form ITER? The opportunity for learning seems
awfully minimal, and if it does complete its goal, as the article points out,
it's not terribly desirable. And if the end goal isn't desirable, where's the
side-effects of tech development? There appears to be none. However many
contractors get rich.

Potential for advancements can be difficult to judge, and the biggest
advancements are almost never expected. But when judging must be done about
potential, it's typically best done by those close to the field rather than by
political means. ITER seems to be more of a political beast [1] than a
scientific one. A political beast that has now robbed the field of fusion of
$20B of dollars that could have gone to other research projects. (There's
significant intra-science politics of course, that greatly steer the course of
research as much as scientific goals. However I'd much rather go with those
political winds than the politics of nations when deciding research.)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16380390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16380390)

~~~
Jedd
> In contrast, the expenditure necessarily must be evaluated in money and
> time, and it's an age old problem: who gets the research allocations?

Sure, but a) when does the evaluation occur (after one year, after two years,
after ten years, or after a new or accidental technology has been demonstrated
to save humanity from certain destruction)?

> In contrast [to genome projects], what can we learn form ITER?

Experimental physics experiments have always suffered this comparison. I can't
address your question, sorry.

Your suggestion that it may all be about the end goal (as if there's always
and only a single end goal for research) is perhaps intentionally misguided -
as you then hint at in your subsequent paragraph.

~~~
cornholio
ITER does not do fundamental research like the LHC, they focus on very
specific technical problems in the field of fusion power - as if it's already
a given that their particular approach to power generation is desirable and
workable.

The author's concern is that even is the problems are solved, tokamak fusion
power is still a prohibitively expensive and unsustainable idea; it's only
natural to question why those research resources funds aren't devoted to other
areas that at least make an attempt to obtain directly useful results. The
tritium economy issue is particularly wexing, any commercial D-T reactor will
need outside, fission produced tritium.

------
PhantomGremlin
I'd love to read equivalent commentary about the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
Compact Fusion project. [https://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-
fusion.ht...](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html)

If Compact Fusion is crank science, why is it on Lockheed's website? Potential
Applications:

    
    
       safe power for safe seas
       planes with unlimited range and unmatched endurance
       power a city of 50,000 people
       speed up space travel
    

Etc. Is that just bullshit to make shareholders feel better? Or are there
realistic alternatives to grandiose megaprojects like ITER?

~~~
Nihilartikel
I think there are quite a few credible alt-fusion projects out there. I have
no particular animus towards ITER but I am disappointed that its multi-decade
scope, megabudget, and sunk cost, are starving research allocation into other
approaches. Some of which seem to have clearer paths to energy production than
magnetic confinement fusion. My favorite dark horse is the inertial
electrostatic confinement Polywell design, which is currently being funded
(crumbs in comparison to ITER) by the Navy, who would of course love a
submarine sized fusion reactor.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell)

Cool thing with the Polywell - if the physics actually pan out, the full size
one should be able to fuse hydrogen and boron, which won't produce neutron
radiation, just alpha particles that can be directly converted to electricity.

------
anovikov
Who cares? How much were the solar cells on the market recently? 22 cents a
watt? Any chance fusion could beat that price, even taken into account solar's
dismal load factors?

~~~
okket
But you need access to sunlight for solar panels to work. You can't have that
constantly due to the rotation of the earth. Or if you move further away from
the sun. Or into the constant shadow of a planet or moon, to shield your
scientific equipment from sun radiation. Or even underwater/underground on
earth. Etc.

So there will always be a use case for fusion energy, if it works.

~~~
anovikov
True, there may be uses cases for it. But with renewables price collapse in
the last 10 years, and very likely further at least 2x price reduction of
solar and slight on wind, this is no longer a make or break thing for
humanity. More research and commercialization of advanced batteries would
further reduce importance of fusion. I am getting to think that fusion has
nearly ran out of time. 10 years down the road, potential market for it may
become too small to justify the immense expenses - and by that point,
'mainstream' projects are not expected to bear fruit yet.

~~~
acidburnNSA
It's easy to make the leap you're making but while intermittent renewable
costs have indeed been falling, they're doing it in an environment with cheap
dispatchable backup natural gas. Once you get to around 50% intermittent
renewable penetration the storage costs get crazy. In a four-state area in the
Pacific Northwest from December 5 to December 15th, all 4 billion watts of
wind generation sat dormant because of a wind lull. Batteries for that would
cost $90 billion and take up a football field 100 stories tall.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_Batteries for that would cost $90 billion and take up a football field 100
stories tall._

Cost is certainly a reasonable argument to make. But not the "football field"
argument for how much area it would take. Given how small a number that is, I
just can't see how that is concerning at all. And besides, nobody is going to
place $90 billion of batteries into a single structure.

A football field is 5351.2 square meters.[1] Instead of a single 100 story
tall structure, how about 100 separate single story structures? That's 535120
square meters.

Let's consider a site in the Pacific Northwest that has lots of excess land
available, the Hanford Site[2] (for some reason, nobody wants to use it for
shopping malls or residential subdivisions). That site is 1,518 square
kilometers.

You could place those 100 football fields of batteries onto 0.035% of the land
area of the Hanford site. There are probably still functional high voltage
transmission lines there, and if not, then building new lines to get that
battery power to BPA's nearby grid wouldn't be difficult or expensive.

Anyway, I'm just being silly. It doesn't make sense to put those batteries
into either a single $90 billion dollar 100 story building, or onto cheap land
at the Hanford site. But having 20 or even 100 separate battery sites
scattered throughout the area is certainly feasible.

Your overall point is valid, even though batteries will eventually become much
cheaper. It's currently difficult to store large amounts of intermittently
generated power.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_field)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site)

~~~
acidburnNSA
You're definitely right that no one would but then in one building. I chose
that analogy because it's easy to visualize, whereas lots of smaller building
are not. My cost estimate included raw lithium only and assumed the land and
building were free to be conservative. Also This is just for 4GWe, a tiny
fraction of the PNWs total energy capacity.

------
Gravityloss
ITER is a very large and tightly packed network of piping, wiring and
components. A change to one part will cascade through the system.

Having spent some time with computer assisted design systems, I suspect making
these changes is a very laborious manual process.

Are we software limited here too?

------
gwbas1c
With all the waste heat, you'd think some kind of district heating would be
attempted?

~~~
pfdietz
ITER will only be able to run at full power for a few weeks before its
materials reach their radiation damage limits, so trying to use its heat
output would not make any sense. And unless they can get disruptions well
under control on non-tritium shots, it will never be allowed to do any DT
runs.

------
pfdietz
ITER is a dead end. It would require multiple miracles to get anything
remotely competitive out of it, and that's just not going to happen.

First, realize what's holding back nuclear fission. It's not nuclear waste, or
safety, or Greenpeace, or the cost of uranium. It's the capital cost of the
powerplants, and to a lesser extent the non-fuel operating cost of the plants.

Fusion would make these two main problems worse, not better.

The fusion power density of ITER's plasma (note: just the plasma, not
including the total volume of the reactor) is 0.6 MW/m^3. The power density of
the core of a pressurized water reactor, on the other hand, is 100 MW/m^3. And
the machinery around a PWR core is much simpler than all the magnets and such
around a fusion core.

(The ARC reactor has somewhat higher power density, but still sucks compared
to a PWR.)

That fusion power density sucks has been known for decades. It follows from
basic physical considerations (square-cube law) and is largely independent of
the details of the reactor design. See Lawrence Lidsky's famous 1983 article
in MIT's Technology Review, "The Trouble With Fusion".

The inevitable result of this is that fusion power will be more expensive than
fission power. The capital cost will be much higher.

ITER's high cost has been explained as due to international coordination, but
actually the cost was lowballed from the start. If they had gone with cost
estimates of previous reactors, and scaled them on the cost/size plot, ITER
should have been estimated at 3-4x what they said it would cost.

Now, operating cost...

Fusion reactors are extremely complex, much more so than fission reactors.
This means they will break more often. And all the parts inboard of a DT (or
DD, or D3He) reactor's biological shield (in ARC, this includes the magnets)
will be too hot for hands-on maintenance. So all the repairs will have to be
done by robots. Good luck with that!

In a reactor the size of ITER, all the armor on the first wall will have to be
water cooled. Each component slab of this armor cannot fail. A single leak in
any of them will render the reactor incapable of sustaining a plasma. I
understand that when conventional reliability estimation techniques are
applied to these things, one concludes the reactor will be able to operate
only a few percent of the time. This isn't even good enough for a research
reactor, never mind a commercial reactor.

And what will fusion face if, by some miracle, a "working" reactor is finally
made? In the last 40 years photovoltaic modules have declined in cost by about
a factor of 200. What will happen in the next 40 years? ITER, if all its
fusion output were converted to electrical power at 40% efficiency (and none
needed to be fed back) would cost > $100/W. PV modules are now about a factor
o 300x less than that. Even if we divide the PV number by four, ITER is so far
out of the running it's absurd.

To finish, I'll add that to truly replace fossil fuels, electrical power has
to come in cheap enough that resistive heat displaces natural gas. This
requires electricity around $0.01/kWh. There appears to be no chance ITER,
ARC, or any of the other fusion schemes could approach this, even with hugely
optimistic assumptions.

------
IntronExon
It’s worth making a few notes:

1\. ITER is a political beast, not a practical one.

2\. These are problems with D-T fusion, not all fusion, although...

3\. Aneutronic fusion isn’t even on the remote horizon. Fusion has incredible
potential, but probably not for anyone alive today.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Regarding point 2, the only drawback I'm aware of with D-T fusion is that it
still produces nuclear waste (whereas aneutronic fusion produces zero/close to
zero nuclear waste), however the nuclear waste produced by D-T fusion is said
to be:

* Smaller in size than the nuclear waste produced by the current approaches to nuclear fission.

* Has a shorter half life than spent nuclear fission fuel, meaning that it doesn't take as long before it's safe to take it out of storage.

Aside from nuclear waste, are there other drawbacks to D-T fusion that people
should be aware of?

~~~
DennisP
Concern about tritium leaks, the need for tritium breeding which limits how
fast you can build new reactors, hard neutron radiation that theoretically
could be used to breed fissiles (but only if you have a high-enough tritium
breeding ratio to keep the reactor fueled, despite not using all your neutrons
for that), and the need for a steam turbine, which means you're not going to
achieve the extremely low costs that may be achievable with aneutronic fusion.

Which doesn't mean D-T is hopeless, just not as good as aneutronic. I've seen
fusion scientists say the waste from D-T reactors would only need to be
contained for several decades.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "the need for a steam turbine"

Where's the steam turbine in the following fusion approach?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus)

[https://lppfusion.com/fusion-power/dpf-device/](https://lppfusion.com/fusion-
power/dpf-device/)

~~~
DennisP
Exactly, that one's aneutronic.

~~~
ZenoArrow
It can use both D-T and pB11. The majority of tests to date have been with
D-T. It's best not to confuse the reactor design with the target fuel.

~~~
DennisP
Actually pure deuterium in the tests so far. But the design explicitly targets
boron fusion. If it were adapted to D-T, then it would in fact need a steam
turbine. The great thing about pB11 is that most of the energy output is fast-
moving charged particles, and that's not true of D-T.

------
jlebrech
Do we really need to build something anymore if we can simulate it in a
computer first?

How did the simulation go and is it a net gain?

I guess if the data varies that it will also help us learn more about physics.

~~~
misnome
Question: How do you know if your simulation is correct?

------
indescions_2018
The contrarian opinion is to increase budget 100X, construct Helium-3 mining
colonies on the lunar surface, and deploy rocket foundries for missions to
Titan and beyond ;)

[http://www.moonexpress.com/](http://www.moonexpress.com/)

Direct Fusion Drive For A Human Mars Orbital Mission

[https://bp.pppl.gov/pub_report/2014/PPPL-5064.pdf](https://bp.pppl.gov/pub_report/2014/PPPL-5064.pdf)

Future Chinese Lunar Missions

[https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/cnsa_moon_future...](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/cnsa_moon_future.html)

------
physicsguy
I went to a talk by one of the materials scientists at JET a few years ago,
and he stressed that in terms of that part, the biggest challenge is the
neutron bombardment of the steel reactor vessel. He was saying that the
biggest problem is that current calculations mean you'd need to replace the
entire highly irradiated reactor vessel after 3/4/5 years or so because of
structural defects and helium bubbles forming in the cracks.

