11 ms·

ITER fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050

106 points by tpatke 9y ago

philipkglass 9y ago
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.
- dest 9y ago
  Maybe someday those power plants will be available in smaller sizes, e.g. for fusion with the discovery of better confinement techniques, or high magnetic field materials
  - milcron 9y ago
    Nuclear plants were originally designed small, as for submarines. For some reason the design trend has been towards larger plants. Perhaps for economies of scale? An interesting watch is Adam Curtis' documentary "A is for Atom", which covers the history of nuclear power. It's usually pretty easy to find Adam's content on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3i9WHHl3qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3i9WHHl3qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc Summary on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(TV_series)#Part_6._.27A_Is_for_Atom.27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(TV_series)#Pa...
    - philipkglass 9y ago
      The larger reactors were supposed to improve the economics of nuclear power once they reached series production. Making the minimum size larger seems to have impeded progression toward series production, zeroing out (and then some) the expected reduction in cost-per-megawatt from larger units. For example, the 1117 MWe AP1000 design that's driven Westinghouse to bankruptcy derives from the AP600 design of only 600 MWe. After-the-fact criticism is too easy, but it seems to me that Westinghouse and its US partners would have suffered less if they were trying to build 4x 600 MWe reactors, and the projects fell behind schedule/over budget, than in their actual situation where they're behind schedule/over budget on 4x 1117 MWe reactors.
      - otp124 9y ago
        Would it be possible to make them modular? As in, build X number of the best submarine-size reactors and drop them in side-by-side in essentially secure concrete warehouses cooled by water pumped from a nearby lake? Kind of like racking servers is what I'm picturing.
        philipkglass 9y ago
        That's the "small modular reactor" concept, under development by a few companies. I think that the concept has considerable merits. I hope that it will be tested in practice. I'm pretty bullish on renewables but nuclear power is very low emissions over its life cycle, safe enough (IMO), and nuclear construction capability should be (again IMO) maintained as a complement/alternative to renewable generation for the post-fossil era. For continued viability new nuclear construction needs lower, more predictable costs or steady long-term support from governments; I think that cost improvements would be the better of the two.
        otp124 9y ago
        Sounds like a viable model, thanks!
        acidburnNSA 9y ago
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Money. Fission is both expensive and risky.
- 21 9y ago
  Fission was killed by Fukushima. While in theory we can build safe reactors, practice shows otherwise.
  - Aron 9y ago
    We've certainly shown that reactors designed in the 60s and built in the 70s are problematic in very rare cases.
    - 21 9y ago
      So you're saying that the nuclear industry was saying before that "yes, we fully agree that we could have a full blown meltdown at one of the older reactors in very rare cases". BTW, how it's a tsunami a very rare case on a decades long horizon? There were warnings about the possibility of a big tsunami. It wasn't a black swan, it was a white one. > A spokesman from the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation [TEPCO] told FRONTLINE that the company was aware of Minoura’s work and was in the process of considering plant modifications in case of a massive tsunami. Fission fails deadly, and humans are really bad at managing these kinds of things (ie: I don't want to pay 200 mil to build a better tsunami barrier for a 1 in a million chance...)
    - logicallee 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        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).
- continuations 9y ago
  > 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 China has Generation IV pebble bed reactors coming online this year that are smaller (210 MWe) [1]. They would be the world's first Gen IV reactors in production. Would be interesting to see how that goes. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809916301552 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809916...
  - MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
    There was an experimental pebble bed test reactor in Germany. That didn't end well, it will be interesting to see if China does it better.
    - honestoHeminway 9y ago
      A collague of my grandfahther spend most of his lives work errecting that reactor, and then building it back until there was only green fields left where the building did stand. Strange thing to do.
- hsod 9y ago
  For anyone else curious, MWe stands for "megawatt electric". The average American home uses very roughly 1000 watts on average [0], so a 500 MWe plant serves very roughly 500,000 American homes. [0]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 901,000 watt-hours per month / (30 * 24) ~= 1,250 watts
  - beojan 9y ago
    An average isn't very helpful here. A single kettle / oven / heater will use 1 kW by itself.
    - theandrewbailey 9y ago
      Not every house will have one of those on at all times. Sure, a house could use many multiples more than 1 kW for a bit, but will go back down eventually.
      - beojan 9y ago
        Yes, that's why an average isn't too meaningful. The times these things are on aren't the same for every house, but they are correlated.
- acidburnNSA 9y ago
  The South Koreans are building large, Gen-III APR-1400s on time and on budget. They picked a standard design, perfected the project management of constructing them, and can now sell them internationally.
  - sanxiyn 9y ago
    South Korea already sold APR-1400 to UAE. Four of them are currently in construction.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  With the growing understanding of externalizing costs and risks is a bad thing for communities and countries making externalized costs explicit to companies more and more, in many countries energy companies fear they would need to insure their plants which together with sinking costs of solar would make fission too costly and non-competing.
- Jedd 9y ago
  > Some countries have formally committed to eliminating power from nuclear fission. Most have not. Most countries have not formally committed to eliminating power from fossil fuels, either - though there's obviously more of a trend in that direction. Point being that past lack of commitment is no indicator of future direction. > 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. Given there's 195 countries - 'most' may be misapplied here. I think it's optimistic to believe that there'll be stable employment for more than a handful of people per nuclear fission power plant. Tax legislation comes and goes. And as to slight risk .. I think that's misrepresenting things too. A risk matrix typically takes into account likelihood vs effect. You may be suggesting there's a 'small likelihood', while ignoring the massive potential effects of an incident -- equating to significant actual risk. A review of the history and progress <sic> of the Hinkley nuclear fission power plant in the UK - a country that certainly meets the pro-nuclear-fission requirement - is sobering. This article (from late 2015), and apologies for Telegraph link [1] is highly depressing. The wikipedia page [2] has a few more recent details. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/nuclearpower/11945485/Nuclear-go-ahead-construction-of-new-plant-to-begin-within-weeks.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/nuclearpower/11... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
dest 9y ago
lets hope this international collaboration will survive through the decades, and that no war or political chaos will stop it.
- jostmey 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    You have a point, but for controlled fusion the applications look only civil to me. Military application/uncontrolled fusion/H bomb already exists!
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - petre 9y ago
    > war sometimes accelerates specific technologies Yes, specifically weapons.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      But also generally useful things like container shipping and jet engines.
- Aron 9y ago
  International collaboration seems more relevant to a John Lennon song than actually getting things done.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cletus 9y ago
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.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  > neutron containment Well... If you run a fusion reactor for long enough, you can dismantle it and use the scrap as fuel for much easier to build fission ones. ;-)
  - raattgift 9y ago
    You need a big enough reactor that a particular type of extreme dismantling produces reasonable amounts of fission-fertile radioisotopes; the bright side however is that the bigger such reactors are the less time "long enough" tends to be. And of course there's the time one might have to wait before beginning to mine them from the scrap...
- dest 9y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, the amount of lithium required for tritium production is quite small compared with the needs for lithium batteries
- 9y ago
woodandsteel 9y ago
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?
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I think fusion could probably produce energy on a much larger scale than renewables. I don't think we can get to ten times or hundred times of current energy consumption with renewables.
  - woodandsteel 9y ago
    >I don't think we can get to ten times or hundred times of current energy consumption with renewables. We can easily get to ten times. And we have no need for a hundred.
- jerf 9y ago
  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.
  - woodandsteel 9y ago
    But Elon Musk says it would take only a an area of land a hundred miles square to power the whole US https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-to-power-the-usa https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-... It's not if it would be nice to free up that land, but rather whether or not countries would be willing to spend the many trillions of dollars it would take, when they always have lots of other financial priorities.
    - 9y ago
DesiLurker 9y ago
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
- api 9y ago
  Mods: can we change the title?
  - dang 9y ago
    Ok we added "ITER" at the beginning. If someone suggests a better (more accurate and neutral) title we can change it again.
    - abefetterman 9y ago
      More descriptive is Tokamak rather than ITER, since ITER is still going to have burning DT plasma in 2035 (at the earliest, according to article).
      - dang 9y ago
        So it should say "Tokamak fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050"? I'm worried that this will provoke more objections. The combo of highly technical + controversial makes it hard to get a title like this right.
- abefetterman 9y ago
  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.
fcanesin 9y ago
"DEMO fusion reactor pushed beyond 2050" would be a much more honest headline.
sverige 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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."
- smnrchrds 9y ago
  I cannot wait to play Half-Life 3 on GNU/HURD! Joking aside, fusion research is infamously underfunded. At the current rate, it may never come to fruition. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...
Aron 9y ago
"It is an international project with seven partners: China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States." Found the problem.
rbanffy 9y ago
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.
- atemerev 9y ago
  If we want electric cars (and stop burning fuel in general), we need a lot of cheap electricity (like, 100x more generation than today, 10x cheaper). Photovoltaics is not environmentally friendly. Wind power is not scalable. Only next-gen nuclear and fusion fit the bill. That said, ITER is not a good approach. Way too expensive, not scalable. It is good as a research project, but we need scalable and cheaper solutions.
  - ju-st 9y ago
    > Photovoltaics is not environmentally friendly. citation needed
    - atemerev 9y ago
      https://www.google.ch/amp/spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-always-as-green-as-you-think.amp.html https://www.google.ch/amp/spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar...
      - dahauns 9y ago
        Two paragraphs in: "The good news is that the industry could readily eliminate many of the damaging side effects that do exist."
cleansy 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Wendelstein-7X is not a fusion machine, it's only a test for the plasma vessel design.
  - DennisP 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        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.
archiidus 9y ago
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-plasmaphysik/ http://omegataupodcast.net/22-nuclear-fusion-at-mpi-fur-plas... http://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-iter/ http://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-iter/
Nihilartikel 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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.

106 points by tpatke 9y ago

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.

dest 9y ago
Maybe someday those power plants will be available in smaller sizes, e.g. for fusion with the discovery of better confinement techniques, or high magnetic field materials
- milcron 9y ago
  Nuclear plants were originally designed small, as for submarines. For some reason the design trend has been towards larger plants. Perhaps for economies of scale? An interesting watch is Adam Curtis' documentary "A is for Atom", which covers the history of nuclear power. It's usually pretty easy to find Adam's content on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3i9WHHl3qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3i9WHHl3qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc Summary on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(TV_series)#Part_6._.27A_Is_for_Atom.27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_Box_(TV_series)#Pa...
  - philipkglass 9y ago
    The larger reactors were supposed to improve the economics of nuclear power once they reached series production. Making the minimum size larger seems to have impeded progression toward series production, zeroing out (and then some) the expected reduction in cost-per-megawatt from larger units. For example, the 1117 MWe AP1000 design that's driven Westinghouse to bankruptcy derives from the AP600 design of only 600 MWe. After-the-fact criticism is too easy, but it seems to me that Westinghouse and its US partners would have suffered less if they were trying to build 4x 600 MWe reactors, and the projects fell behind schedule/over budget, than in their actual situation where they're behind schedule/over budget on 4x 1117 MWe reactors.
    - otp124 9y ago
      Would it be possible to make them modular? As in, build X number of the best submarine-size reactors and drop them in side-by-side in essentially secure concrete warehouses cooled by water pumped from a nearby lake? Kind of like racking servers is what I'm picturing.
      - philipkglass 9y ago
        That's the "small modular reactor" concept, under development by a few companies. I think that the concept has considerable merits. I hope that it will be tested in practice. I'm pretty bullish on renewables but nuclear power is very low emissions over its life cycle, safe enough (IMO), and nuclear construction capability should be (again IMO) maintained as a complement/alternative to renewable generation for the post-fossil era. For continued viability new nuclear construction needs lower, more predictable costs or steady long-term support from governments; I think that cost improvements would be the better of the two.
        otp124 9y ago
        Sounds like a viable model, thanks!
      - acidburnNSA 9y ago
Spooky23 9y ago
Money. Fission is both expensive and risky.
21 9y ago
Fission was killed by Fukushima. While in theory we can build safe reactors, practice shows otherwise.
- Aron 9y ago
  We've certainly shown that reactors designed in the 60s and built in the 70s are problematic in very rare cases.
  - 21 9y ago
    So you're saying that the nuclear industry was saying before that "yes, we fully agree that we could have a full blown meltdown at one of the older reactors in very rare cases". BTW, how it's a tsunami a very rare case on a decades long horizon? There were warnings about the possibility of a big tsunami. It wasn't a black swan, it was a white one. > A spokesman from the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation [TEPCO] told FRONTLINE that the company was aware of Minoura’s work and was in the process of considering plant modifications in case of a massive tsunami. Fission fails deadly, and humans are really bad at managing these kinds of things (ie: I don't want to pay 200 mil to build a better tsunami barrier for a 1 in a million chance...)
  - logicallee 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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).
continuations 9y ago
> 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 China has Generation IV pebble bed reactors coming online this year that are smaller (210 MWe) [1]. They would be the world's first Gen IV reactors in production. Would be interesting to see how that goes. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809916301552 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809916...
- MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
  There was an experimental pebble bed test reactor in Germany. That didn't end well, it will be interesting to see if China does it better.
  - honestoHeminway 9y ago
    A collague of my grandfahther spend most of his lives work errecting that reactor, and then building it back until there was only green fields left where the building did stand. Strange thing to do.
hsod 9y ago
For anyone else curious, MWe stands for "megawatt electric". The average American home uses very roughly 1000 watts on average [0], so a 500 MWe plant serves very roughly 500,000 American homes. [0]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 901,000 watt-hours per month / (30 * 24) ~= 1,250 watts
- beojan 9y ago
  An average isn't very helpful here. A single kettle / oven / heater will use 1 kW by itself.
  - theandrewbailey 9y ago
    Not every house will have one of those on at all times. Sure, a house could use many multiples more than 1 kW for a bit, but will go back down eventually.
    - beojan 9y ago
      Yes, that's why an average isn't too meaningful. The times these things are on aren't the same for every house, but they are correlated.
acidburnNSA 9y ago
The South Koreans are building large, Gen-III APR-1400s on time and on budget. They picked a standard design, perfected the project management of constructing them, and can now sell them internationally.
- sanxiyn 9y ago
  South Korea already sold APR-1400 to UAE. Four of them are currently in construction.
_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
With the growing understanding of externalizing costs and risks is a bad thing for communities and countries making externalized costs explicit to companies more and more, in many countries energy companies fear they would need to insure their plants which together with sinking costs of solar would make fission too costly and non-competing.
Jedd 9y ago
> Some countries have formally committed to eliminating power from nuclear fission. Most have not. Most countries have not formally committed to eliminating power from fossil fuels, either - though there's obviously more of a trend in that direction. Point being that past lack of commitment is no indicator of future direction. > 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. Given there's 195 countries - 'most' may be misapplied here. I think it's optimistic to believe that there'll be stable employment for more than a handful of people per nuclear fission power plant. Tax legislation comes and goes. And as to slight risk .. I think that's misrepresenting things too. A risk matrix typically takes into account likelihood vs effect. You may be suggesting there's a 'small likelihood', while ignoring the massive potential effects of an incident -- equating to significant actual risk. A review of the history and progress <sic> of the Hinkley nuclear fission power plant in the UK - a country that certainly meets the pro-nuclear-fission requirement - is sobering. This article (from late 2015), and apologies for Telegraph link [1] is highly depressing. The wikipedia page [2] has a few more recent details. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/nuclearpower/11945485/Nuclear-go-ahead-construction-of-new-plant-to-begin-within-weeks.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/nuclearpower/11... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

dest 9y ago

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

jostmey 9y ago
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 9y ago
  You have a point, but for controlled fusion the applications look only civil to me. Military application/uncontrolled fusion/H bomb already exists!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- petre 9y ago
  > war sometimes accelerates specific technologies Yes, specifically weapons.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    But also generally useful things like container shipping and jet engines.
Aron 9y ago
International collaboration seems more relevant to a John Lennon song than actually getting things done.

deleted 9y ago

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cletus 9y ago

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.

rbanffy 9y ago
> neutron containment Well... If you run a fusion reactor for long enough, you can dismantle it and use the scrap as fuel for much easier to build fission ones. ;-)
- raattgift 9y ago
  You need a big enough reactor that a particular type of extreme dismantling produces reasonable amounts of fission-fertile radioisotopes; the bright side however is that the bigger such reactors are the less time "long enough" tends to be. And of course there's the time one might have to wait before beginning to mine them from the scrap...
dest 9y ago
If I'm not mistaken, the amount of lithium required for tritium production is quite small compared with the needs for lithium batteries
9y ago

woodandsteel 9y ago

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?

maxxxxx 9y ago
I think fusion could probably produce energy on a much larger scale than renewables. I don't think we can get to ten times or hundred times of current energy consumption with renewables.
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  >I don't think we can get to ten times or hundred times of current energy consumption with renewables. We can easily get to ten times. And we have no need for a hundred.
jerf 9y ago
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.
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  But Elon Musk says it would take only a an area of land a hundred miles square to power the whole US https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-to-power-the-usa https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-... It's not if it would be nice to free up that land, but rather whether or not countries would be willing to spend the many trillions of dollars it would take, when they always have lots of other financial priorities.
  - 9y ago

DesiLurker 9y ago

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

api 9y ago
Mods: can we change the title?
- dang 9y ago
  Ok we added "ITER" at the beginning. If someone suggests a better (more accurate and neutral) title we can change it again.
  - abefetterman 9y ago
    More descriptive is Tokamak rather than ITER, since ITER is still going to have burning DT plasma in 2035 (at the earliest, according to article).
    - dang 9y ago
      So it should say "Tokamak fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050"? I'm worried that this will provoke more objections. The combo of highly technical + controversial makes it hard to get a title like this right.
abefetterman 9y ago
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.

fcanesin 9y ago

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

sverige 9y ago

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 9y ago
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."
smnrchrds 9y ago
I cannot wait to play Half-Life 3 on GNU/HURD! Joking aside, fusion research is infamously underfunded. At the current rate, it may never come to fruition. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...

Aron 9y ago

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

rbanffy 9y ago

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.

atemerev 9y ago
If we want electric cars (and stop burning fuel in general), we need a lot of cheap electricity (like, 100x more generation than today, 10x cheaper). Photovoltaics is not environmentally friendly. Wind power is not scalable. Only next-gen nuclear and fusion fit the bill. That said, ITER is not a good approach. Way too expensive, not scalable. It is good as a research project, but we need scalable and cheaper solutions.
- ju-st 9y ago
  > Photovoltaics is not environmentally friendly. citation needed
  - atemerev 9y ago
    https://www.google.ch/amp/spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-always-as-green-as-you-think.amp.html https://www.google.ch/amp/spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar...
    - dahauns 9y ago
      Two paragraphs in: "The good news is that the industry could readily eliminate many of the damaging side effects that do exist."

cleansy 9y ago

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 9y ago
Wendelstein-7X is not a fusion machine, it's only a test for the plasma vessel design.
- DennisP 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.

archiidus 9y ago

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-plasmaphysik/ http://omegataupodcast.net/22-nuclear-fusion-at-mpi-fur-plas... http://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-iter/ http://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-iter/

Nihilartikel 9y ago

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 9y ago
> 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.