World’s Largest Fusion Project Is in Big Trouble
It could be a new world record, although no one involved wants to talk about it. In the south of France, a collaboration among 35 countries has been birthing one of the largest and most ambitious scientific experiments ever conceived: the giant fusion power machine known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). But the only record ITER seems certain to set doesn’t involve “burning” plasma at temperatures 10 times higher than that of the sun’s core, keeping this “artificial star” ablaze and generating net energy for seconds at a time or any of fusion energy’s other spectacular and myriad prerequisites. Instead ITER is on the verge of a record-setting disaster as accumulated schedule slips and budget overruns threaten to make it the most delayed—and most cost-inflated—science project in history.
Well, lots of people will have been paid lots of money to achieve mostly nothing, so there’s that.
What is absurd is Scientific American pretending there’s any news here. All of this was known long, long ago. Iter is a research project. Its completion date matters to no one and nothing. Iter has 35 members who provide financing to complete the project voluntarily. Hence there never was and never can be a meaningful completion schedule.
I got my PhD at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in the 1969. They were working then on a precursor to ITER. Fusion breakeven was 50 years away then, and is 50 years away now. Kate, you posted a good analysis of the Livermore laser “breakthrough” a while ago, pointing out that the (very inefficient) laser input energy was ignored in their claims. There may be some private fusion projects that have promise, but nothing lavishly funded by governments is ever likely to result in a fusion power plant.
Duke – you hit the nail on the head. Privately owned Commonwealth Fusion has made several groundbreaking breakthroughs, including the world’s strongest magnet to contain the fusion reaction, but even they seem to have slowed down their rate of announcements.
This article from two weeks ago seems to indicate that the DOE agrees with you.
“Commonwealth Fusion Systems Selected by U.S. DOE for Milestone Program to Accelerate Commercial Fusion Energy ”
https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/cfs-doe-milestone-fusion-development-program
Time will tell.
If only there was some form of energy that was abundant, transportable and storable ….
and we didn’t need any R&D projects to get at it …
Proving it’s far easier to simply CUT all your fossil fuel access … scold you that your white privilege doesn’t earn you the right to be warm and comfortable… and make you freeze in the dark.
Fusion is a fun science experiment, and no doubt the ones who are first successful will be remembered by history, but if the intent is to provide a practical source of energy in the foreseeable future, then it is a tremendous waste of resources that could be going to develop next generation fission power.
From Wikipedia:
“…ITER is funded and run by seven member parties: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States … The initial budget was close to €6 billion, but the total price of construction and operations is projected to be from €18 to €22 billion;[20][21] other estimates place the total cost between $45 billion and $65 billion,..”
You just have to laugh.
Thus is answered the question of why fusion is always 20 years away. If they actually lit the damn thing their cushy research jobs would become real engineering and they’d have to work.
Incidentally, Ignition was achieved at Lawrence Livermore last year. So progress does get made, just not at iron rice bowl ITER.
One day there is going to be an Earth-shattering Ka-Boom.
Now if only we could harness the energy from a Volcano…….
The headline was interesting.
The information ?
Business as usual.
It is a career folks and this “Joint venture” will blunder on until the participating countries pull their funding.
This is “Modern Science”.
The lack of any product?
Was one ever expected?