Nuclear Fusion

[Mr. B]

Has anyone seen this before?
http://www.iter.org/
Its a fusion project between the US, EU, Russia, JApan and China. Supposedly they are ready to begin construction and have only to choose a site. They say it will be ready by 2015.
I thought that workable fusion was years away, but I guess I was wrong.

[Patrick Degan]

That's still a long way before commercially-viable fusion enters the overall power equation for this civilisation. The year 2015 is merely when they project that the pilot plant will be completed and ready to go online, and the scheduling charts indicate that it will still largely be an experimental more than a commercial project well into the 2040s. Suffice to say, nuclear fission and most of the conventional power-production infrastructure will be carrying the load for some time to come.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Recently the US has been thinking of pulling out altogether.

[Shinova]

Hmm, figures the lobbies would have that much power in Congress, although I don't know what I'm talking about.


As long as someone gets fusion power, someone responsible I hope, that's good.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Short of ITER, the only real contender is JET in the UK. But if you want to makea breakthrough, a global consortium would be best.

[Shinova]

If the US pulls out and ignores fusion research altogether, eventually someone else is going to get it, and they'll reap the enormous profits from fusion in the long term while the US is stuck paying up to have some of the benefit, or be stuck with fossil fuels and traditional nuclear.



I just love short-term economics.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Recently the US has been thinking of pulling out altogether.

Bah, that fucking blows bloody mangled testicles right through an ISD's armor belt! Can't kick your oil addiction, eh US?

[Admiral Valdemar]

Bah, that fucking blows bloody mangled testicles right through an ISD's armor belt! Can't kick your oil addiction, eh US?

Actually, no. It was because the consortium cannot decide on where to build the reactor. The US and South Korea want it built at Japan's location. Russia and China want it built in the EU's location. This little scuffle has stifled progress for months and Congress sees the project as collapsing, so either Japan or the EU settle this or the project dies a death.

[Shinova]

Geh, why can't they go the middle route (almost literally) and build it in the US?

[SPOOFE]

Geh, why can't they go the middle route (almost literally) and build it in the US?

Because then everyone else will pull out, lamenting how selfish America is.

When you're the Big Dog on campus, you tend to get all the blame.

[Admiral Valdemar]

As much as we (the world) would love to blame the US here (because we all know that place deserves the rage of a thousand worlds), it's really just a shitstorm of politics and self-serving interests from each nation involved that has caused this. As usual, the politicians stop the scientists and engineers from advancing our science. Bra-fucking-o.

[SirNitram]

Geh, why can't they go the middle route (almost literally) and build it in the US?

Because then everyone else will pull out, lamenting how selfish America is.

When you're the Big Dog on campus, you tend to get all the blame.

As much as you love to claim this BS, it's really because the political enviroment is anathema. IE, people in the US think it would blow up like a bomb and thus would have NIMBY out the ass.

[tharkûn]

IE, people in the US think it would blow up like a bomb and thus would have NIMBY out the ass.

Considering how much land the US government owns, as in more land than the entire nation of France, finding a place to build it would be easy as hell. Given the money involved, you could easily find dozens of towns willing to host the facility as it will multiplicatively increase the tax base. You could likely just expand one of the pre-existing nuclear facilities in the US without problem.

The reason the US is pissed happens to be that the EU issued an ultimatum to Japan that they could either except the French location, or not be a participant. The Potocnik's threat to "go it alone" went over in congress about as well as a lead balloon and that gave rise to counter threats of the US to pull out and even some scuttlebutt about just dropping 15 billion to build an American reactor in the US.

In all honesty the funding isn't that high compared to most national budgets, what everyone is thinking about at the national level is that ITER will be a Mecca for the brilliant fusion physicists and the support industry of the host nation will receive a competitive advantage so when ITER does commericialize they will reap massive economic benifit by having a leg up. How the US/Japan/Korea vs China/EU/Russia lineup emerged is simply a matter of geopolitics and backroom deals. China and Korea haven't a hope of getting the project, so they are 'selling' their votes in some fun quid pro quo. Russia and the US, allegedly, are looking to be hosts of the next generation plant and hence are thought to have back scratching deals, each also supports the location that gives its economy the easiest access to the project. Which leaves the EU and Japan, who have been offering all sorts of deals to get the other to agree and to keep their backers behind them.

Frankly the US, Canada, or the UK would be the best location. English is the language of science and it would be easier to location in an anglophone environment. The US military already has some major infrastructure in place and there is far more private capital at hand to harness (NAFTA and NATO make it easy to utilize that in the great white north). The UK would be great if you just made a fusion 'hub' around JET. All of which is completely irrelevant at this point as it will be a political decision.

[Mr. B]

Its nice to know that some things never change. Politics getting in the way of scientific advancement. Its like stem cell research all over again, or the other way around. The US should just build their own. But as long as it gets built the better off we all are.

[kheegster]

Has anyone seen this before?
http://www.iter.org/
Its a fusion project between the US, EU, Russia, JApan and China. Supposedly they are ready to begin construction and have only to choose a site. They say it will be ready by 2015.
I thought that workable fusion was years away, but I guess I was wrong.

ITER is more of an experimental test-bed than a power-generating reactor. It's hoped that it will produce more power than it consumes in the course of its operations, but there is no provision for extracting that power. ITER is projected to have a 20 year operational lifespan, so the first power generating fusion plant will probably come online a decade after that, which makes it ~2045. So commercial fusion plants might come within our lifetime, but not very soon.

As for the US threatening to pull out of ITER (they did pull out a few years back, but got back in a couple of years ago), I suspect it's because they want to concentrate more on inertial confinement fusion, at which it's a world leader (due to its close connection with weapons research). The US doesn't have the knowhow or experience of either Europe or Japan in building tokamaks, so they can't just go and build their own tokamak.

[phongn]

The US had an alternate magnetic confinement project (FIRE) but that was cancelled when we re-entered ITER.

[Crown]

Didn't they just split the difference in the end, and decide to build two?

[kheegster]

Didn't they just split the difference in the end, and decide to build two?

Because the current approach towards achieving mag confinement fusion is to scale things up until it works, so if the programmes are split, then the two resulting tokamaks will be considerably smaller than ITER, which makes them pretty much useless.

[tharkûn]

As for the US threatening to pull out of ITER (they did pull out a few years back, but got back in a couple of years ago), I suspect it's because they want to concentrate more on inertial confinement fusion, at which it's a world leader (due to its close connection with weapons research). The US doesn't have the knowhow or experience of either Europe or Japan in building tokamaks, so they can't just go and build their own tokamak.

The nuclear physicists at my school disagree. Building up some of the support in the US would undoubtedly raise the price tag, but only a few billion, given that both sites now in question require offsets by the host it wouldn't be much more difficult to build in the US. Knowhow and experience can be bought and imported, which the US has a fine tradition of doing.

Didn't they just split the difference in the end, and decide to build two?

Europe is proposing to build a massive related research center in Japan and add costs to the project by increasing the amount of Japanese industrial support to be used in France. The deals on the table keep spinning around, but essentially France wants the actual tokamok and will pay vast sums to get it. Hell I've heard someone proposing building the damn thing in Israel, granted in frustation, just to stop the pissing contest.

[SPOOFE]

As much as you love to claim this BS, it's really because the political enviroment is anathema. IE, people in the US think it would blow up like a bomb and thus would have NIMBY out the ass.

Either way, it's politics. In the end I think we can all agree that political maneuverings are often stifling.

[Ender]

We just need to stick someone as politically connected and pigheaded as Rickover was in charge of this thing and have them bully everyone until we get the damn thing working. We would have had working fusion years ago if we had put as much drive into fusion as we did fission.

[Patrick Degan]

We just need to stick someone as politically connected and pigheaded as Rickover was in charge of this thing and have them bully everyone until we get the damn thing working. We would have had working fusion years ago if we had put as much drive into fusion as we did fission.

Yes, well, that drive was in large measure the byproduct of the Manhattan Project and the cold war. There is no present military imperative for fusion power as there was in the 40s and 50s.

[RedImperator]

We just need to stick someone as politically connected and pigheaded as Rickover was in charge of this thing and have them bully everyone until we get the damn thing working. We would have had working fusion years ago if we had put as much drive into fusion as we did fission.

Yes, well, that drive was in large measure the byproduct of the Manhattan Project and the cold war. There is no present military imperative for fusion power as there was in the 40s and 50s.

Oil closed at $51.30 today. That looks like a damn military imperative from where I'm sitting.

[Ford Prefect]

Why don't they build it somewhere else. Like Australia, or Africa. I'd like to have a Fusion Reactor in my backyard. Makes your bog standard BBQ look kinda ordinary.

Of course, politics will never allow it.

[Castor Troy]

What happened to that one idea of taking metallic spheres filled with hydrogen and using lasers to detonate them? I take it it's just not as economically feasible as a plasma torus?