Nuclear fusion power project to start in slimmed-down version
June 8, 2009 by Laurence ChabertA multi-billion-dollar project to prove whether nuclear fusion, the power that fuels the Sun, can be a practicable energy source is to be scaled down in its early stages, sources said on Monday.
The test reactor, to be built at a site in southern France, will start its experiments in 2018 as scheduled but will initially be built in a slimmed-down form, they said.
"Discussions are underway about the best timetable," Catherine Cesarsky of France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) told journalists on the sidelines of a science conference here.
"There is a new commissioning strategy, a detailed discussion about the machine's deployment."
A decision approving the change will be put next week to the partners in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), she said.
Launched in 2006 after years of debate, the scheme aims at building a testbed at Cadarache, near Marseille, to see whether fusion, so far achieved in a handful of labs at great cost, can be a feasible power source.
Its seven backers are the European Union (EU), China, India, South Korea, Japan, Russia and the United States. Kazakhstan is poised to become the eighth member.
Nuclear fusion entails forcing together the nuclei of light atomic elements in a super-heated plasma, held in a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak, so that they make heavier elements and in so doing release energy.
The process, used by the Sun and other stars, would be safe and have negligible problems of waste, say its defenders.
In contrast, nuclear fission, which entails splitting the nucleus of an atom to release energy, remains dogged by concerns about safety and dangerously radioactive long-term waste.
Cesarsky said the first experiments would begin on schedule in 2018 "but with a machine that will be less complete than initially thought."
"Technically, it is far more valuable to do the first plasma with an ITER that is not completely finished, because if there is a simple problem it can be detected."
A spokesman for ITER told AFP that the scaled-down version would entail using hydrogen initially.
Key experiments using tritium and deuterium, designed to validate fusion as a producer of large amounts of power, would not take place until 2026, the spokesman said.
This would be around five years later than previously scheduled.
The planned changes will be submitted to the ITER council, meeting in Mito, Japan, on June 17 and 18, he said.
The council will meet again in November to make a new assessment of costs, the official said.
Four years ago, ITER was priced at around 10 billion euros (13.8 billion dollars today), spread among its stakeholders, led by the EU, which has a 45-percent share.
Five billion euros (6.9 billion dollars) would go to constructing the tokamak and other facilities, and five billion euros to the 20-year operations phase.
Last month, the British science journal Nature said construction costs "are likely to double" and the cost of operations "may also rise."
If ITER is a success, the next step would be to build a commercial reactor, a goal likely to be further decades away.
(c) 2009 AFP
May 19, 2006 |
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Seems like all the eggs have been put into the wrong basket.
Time to look at new approaches, of which there are several, all underfunded while this monster gobbles up billions with nothing of consequence to show for it. Except employment of engineers and bureaucrats.
dirk-this isnt by any means a waste of time or money..even if it took us 100 years to create, it would generate power for what, a few thousand years afterwards I think I read at some point. I bet we'll acheive it earlier than targeted, and afterwards I bet we'll find a bunch of other ways to do it.
Once we do, it will be more useful and interchangeable as a power source to us than anything and everything short of zero point energy :)
Yeah, electricity will be too cheap to be metered.
It is a difference in power and energy management. I am all for Fusion -- but i doubt i will see it in my life time -- but when we do realize it, it will change the world ecomonies -- just like if we made but loads of superconducting fiber would totally change our economies we have the technology but not the money - and time - to back them
There is a massive resource in all the people who are currently out of work who could be given jobs to help fast track the project. Let alone all the unemployed people from the third world who would love a salary for a few years.
They certainly don't have any problems with cash flow as they are prepared to take on massive amounts of debt at the moment anyway.
Fusion and highly efficient energy sources are a total threat to the establishment so that is why they will not let the technology progress faster.
As for links:
- for a long explanation by Bussard himself, search for "should google go nuclear" on YouTube (it helps to know some nuclear physics, but it's watchable if you skip the really hardcore stuff)
- for a few indications about the history of the research, see www.emc2fusion.org
- and for the latest discussions about what's being done (at present only with limited funding from the U.S. Navy), go to the Polywell reactor forum at talk-polywell.org
Hydrogen is "smoke", not "fuel", for the nuclear engine that powers the Sun.
Each year the Sun discards 50,000 billion metric tons of Hydrogen (a neutron-decay product) in the solar wind. See "The Sun is a plasma diffuser that sorts atoms by mass," Physics of Atomic Nuclei 69 (2006) pages 1847-1856; Yadernaya Fizika (Russian) 69 number 11, (Nov 2006); PAC: 96.20.Dt DOI: 10.1134/S106377880611007X
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
donjoe0, trantor, et al ...
Perhaps letting the reat of the world fund this experiment makes sence for America at this time. Obviously the whole 'tokamak' idea is not going to be popular with the American taxpayer for a few decades to come, and the Navy have had the disappointing results from Polywell that they can not use a nice safe reactor in their submarines, (according the the final results, this power source has claustrophobia).
On the other hand, the Europeans also appear to have read the Polywell results and (perhaps) 'downsized' the original experiment as a result - just to check that the next steps are truly feasible: technically, fiscally and politically.
Just in case you fellows have any doubts, you might e-mail those 'stupid' Europeans and make sure they have read the Polywell reports, and are not wasting money better spent on greenhouse gas monitoring and control.