RoR: Forum

I wish them well. The Suez Canal, the Panama Canal,... My wife and I visited the Hoover Dam after I worked at Kennedy Space Center, and at Hoover Dam finally "got" the Vehicle Assembly Building and the Crawler. The audacity of large projects speaks to who we are, as much as does the work of the solitary inventor who sees a truth that no one else does. Ayn Rand's calling it "monument building" does it an injustice. The Pyramids do deliver an admonishment that the Parthenon does not. Athenian citizens were paid in silver for their choice to work on public building projects. That is true. Nonethess, the economics of dynastic Egypt aside, the feat can only be admired.

So, we have to keep this in context.

It is not exactly ignored, but being decades out, it is not exactly news, yet, either. (They claim that they will be ready by 2020, but 2040 might be more realistic. See below.) You can find news about this just by entering "iter nucelar fusion" in a search engine.

These links from the organization site will introduce the project, give many many choices for information, and let you see them as they present themselves.
http://www.iter.org/
http://www.iter.org/construction
http://www.iter.org/newsline/266

Among the mass news stories I found were these from CNN, IEEE Spectrum , and other sources.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/12/opinion/fusion-nuclear-energy-future
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/sep/16/nuclear-fusion-iter-jet-forshaw
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nuclear-fusion-project-struggles-to-put-the-pieces-together
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/fusion-is-not-free

In addition, Free Republic and other alternative media have not missed this.

With ITER’s enormous size comes enormous complexity and cost. This, [Lockheed Skunksworks mananger Charles] Chase says, is pushing the delivery date back by decades. “The first power plant based on ITER is not projected to be ready until the mid-2040s at best.”
News from Engineering.com story here.

In 1978, the EC, Japan, USA and USSR joined in the International Tokamak Reactor (INTOR) Workshop, under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to assess the readiness of magnetic fusion to move forward to the experimental power reactor (EPR) stage, to identify the additional R&D that must be undertaken and to define the characteristics of such an EPR by means of a conceptual design. Hundreds of fusion scientists and engineers in each participating country took part in a detailed assessment of ...

The ITER project was initiated in 1988. The history of the INTOR Workshop is documented in "Quest for a Fusion Energy Reactor: An Insider's Account of the INTOR Workshop", Oxford University Press (2010).

Launched in 1985,[23] the ITER project was formally agreed to and funded in 2006 with a cost estimate of $12.8 billion (10 billion Euro) projecting the start of construction in 2008 and completion a decade later.[9]

French Nobel laureate in physics, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes said of nuclear fusion, "We say that we will put the sun into a box. The idea is pretty. The problem is, we don't know how to make the box."[37]
Wikipedia here.

Post 1

Sunday, May 5, 2013 - 12:30pm

Interesting speed bumps along the way;

Reagan signed us up for ITER in the 80s. The worlds best and brightest government leaders immediately entered a 20+ year period of political bickering over where the first experiment would be built.

Clinton pulled the US out of ITER in the 90s.

Bush put as back in. No great loss in the interim, because the political bickering only recently ended, with France getting the plum. However, when the US was let back into ITER, it was no longer at the big peoples table.

The US Dept of Energy since the 50's has had deep investment into Fusion research. PPL(Plasm Physics Lab out on FOrrestal Campus on Route 1) at Princeton is a DOE facility; also DOE at MIT, many research universities.. Alot of folks been spending a lot of money for a long time chasing fusion. Here. Russia. China. France.

But it is ripe. What used to be rare(sustained plasmas)is now commonplace, and plasmas of arbitrary duration can be achieved. The last remaining major hurdle is the self-breeding of an adequate supply of Tritium from the Lithium cooling blankets. There is abundant Deuterium in the world -- the energy equivalent in every gallon of water of 300 gallons of gasoline -- but the required Tritium is rare. (There may be only be about 200 kG of Tritium worldwide at any given time-- when produced, it decays. It is used to augment nuclear weapons, and also for some medical devices. There isn't a lot of it around presently.)

The D-T reaction is easier to achieve than the D-D reaction, so is the natural first target for fusion. Eventually, D-D will replace that, but until then, availability of Tritium will be a limiting factor, unless it can be self-bred from the Lithium cooling blankets.

Why the 20 yrs of do nothing political bickering? Why the liesurely sense of non-urgency?

Consider for a moment what happens to modern governments and geopolitics when energy is as endemic as water.

Total geopolitical game changer. I mean, total.

regards,
Fred

Post 2

Thursday, May 9, 2013 - 5:20am

"Fusion is like trying to put the Sun in a box - but we don't know how to make the box

Professor Sebastien Balibar"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8103557.stm

It's remarkable how these two men claim to have come up with the same pithy repackaging of the Green Party talking points on the topic of fusion. But I'd have to be a paranoid to believe that the in-ter-net, of all places, would be used to market an anti-capitalism, anti-technology, anti-industrial campaign by wigged out tree huggers. Slap a quote on wiki, complete with footnotes unchecked pointing at poor Michiu Kaku, and browbeat the sleepy with a cut and paste bibliography...what did you do in the war, Daddy?

Plasmas of arbitrary duration are now routinely achieved; the remaining challenges are practical engineering challenges...

..and, rising above the in-ter-net generated noise of the flotsam floating adrift in Hegel's wreckage(the fellow travelers bemoaning the demise of the USSR) who ended up in the 'environmental movement' as their soft landing.

Governmental program running over budget? I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you.

Medicare started out at $3B/yr; do we think it is a little over budget?

JFK spent $100B (and some of that was on fusion research, continuously, since the 50s...) ; do we think we're a little overbudget at $3800B?

Post 3

Sunday, June 2, 2013 - 2:41pm

Michael:

RE: I wish them well. The Suez Canal, the Panama Canal,... My wife and I visited the Hoover Dam after I worked at Kennedy Space Center, and at Hoover Dam finally "got" the Vehicle Assembly Building and the Crawler. The audacity of large projects speaks to who we are, as much as does the work of the solitary inventor who sees a truth that no one else does.

The Suez Canal.

The Panama Canal.

Hoover Dam.

Kennedy Space Center... Man on the Moon.

Let's add 'The Interstate Highway System.'

All examples of accomplishments from a period in our history that was either decades before or contemporary with JFK's $100B in federal spending in a nation of 180 million people.

Flash ahead to 2013, and a federal government spending $3800B/yr, over 38 times more, in a nation not even twice as large as JFK's 180 million.

Inflation accounts for a factor of only x7.5 since JFKs $100B. I've spelled this out a thousand times. We have to be generous to adjust JFK's $100B to maybe 1500B today.

We are spending, over and above JFK's 1500B, an -extra- nearly seventy Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs worth of spending(fully adjusted to current dollars.)

Look at your list of great accomplishements. When were the y accomplished? How large was the fedeal government during those periods?

What is -this- federal government doing with almost $4T/yr that will -ever- make it onto your list of great accomplishments?

Michael, something isn't a little off in this picture; it is massively off. We are spending the fully adjusted equivalent of over 70 Mercury/Gemini/Aapollo programs per year above and beyond JFK's full adjusted 1500B/yr(over half of which was for defense at the peak of the Cold War.)

What, in that extra 70 Mercury/Gemini/Apollo pograms of federal spending, will be remembered in 40 years?

Hell; in four months?

regards,
Fred
(Edited by Fred Bartlett on 6/02, 2:43pm)

Post 4

Sunday, June 2, 2013 - 2:45pm