ITER is one of the most ambitious energy projects
iter.org
iter.org
The ITER project is only fueling that skepticism. They started with projected building costs of around 6 billion euro and before they really started these costs have already more than doubled. It seems very likely that if this project ever gets finished the costs will rise a lot more. If you're advocating for nuclear fusion and projects like ITER then my first advice would be to be honest: It won't be a bargain.
That said I want to mention why I'm so skeptical about fusion: It is often quoted as some kind of magical energy source without problems. Although it's hard to make predictions about a technology that isn't working yet, most likely it will mean expensive, huge power plants that generate large amounts of energy at one place. That means even if you are able to build these plants technically, you face a number of additional challenges: Getting it to work so that it makes any economic sense (competing probably mostly against much cheaper wind and solar which will likely be much cheaper than today when fusion is ready) and getting energy transmission working at a huge scale. Right now for many energy projects transmission lines are a major cost and acceptance factor already.
We have to try EVERYTHING in order to beat climate change, up to and including moonshots like this.
Sadly this strange hatred of anything nuclear by environmentalists has done more to harm this planet and its people.
BTW 6 billion is nothing when compared to over a hundred billion that for example Germany has spent on renewables, same Germany that replacing nuclear with coal on the other hand.
Aside was just watching this documentary on BBC on tv there > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtp51eZkwoI The vision and drive of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs back in 19th and 20th centuries have lifted the world from literal darkness into the modern system of grids and electricity on a flick of a switch. I am sure there were many naysayers back in their day on top of all the obstacles they faced, these guys such as Edison and his team kept buggering on, and the modern world is thankful for foundations they laid.
Let the scientists and engineers at ITER do their job and instead of moaning about it keep pressure on politicians to spend money on projects like this instead of bombing people in other countries.
They certainly can, and going 100% renewable by 2050 is feasible. [1] Once you add in nuclear, it's only more feasible (though maybe more expensive).
Taking a look at the five potential plans for the UK from 2009 [2], they are now much more potentially feasible as solar and storage technology has plummeted in price far more quickly than anticipated.
It's only a matter of political feasibility, not engineering or industrial feasibility. That's why these plans need to be reevaluated every 12 months, because technology for renewables is changing so much more quickly than any of the conventional technologies do, and the boundary for economic feasibility is quickly quickly shifting.
[1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Count...
Also saying you want to try "everything" without considering potential downsides seems strange to me. There's only so much money there to spend. And I think there are other technologies more promising and more needed that would need better funding (e.g. new energy storage methods could need some support).
The 6 billion is not the number this will cost. This is the original number that is now deprecated by a much higher number. And the comparison to the German renewable costs is comparing apples and oranges. Germany spends this money on electricity generation, which is a very different thing from funding a technology which may or may not produce energy in a distant future.
Those are both mainstream projects that leverage the work on tokamaks, so the risk is relatively low. A bunch of companies are pursuing higher-risk alternatives that could be even better. Tri Alpha, for example, recently achieved stable plasma in their field-reversed configuration [3]; their last milestone is to increase temperature, and see whether the plasma gets more stable as their model predicts. Last I saw, they were planning a 100MW reactor. Helion, which has a similar but pulsed design, is aiming for 50MW [4].
[1] http://news.mit.edu/2015/small-modular-efficient-fusion-plan...
[2] http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/inside-the-dynomak-a...
[3] http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/08/secretive-fusion-...
We're at the point with current technology that we have tremendous gains that can be had simply by scaling industry. We don't need one GigaFactory, we need 200 of them.
Whether you consider that worth the price will largely depend on whether you believe it's game-changing. I don't.
Nuclear fusion pretty much powers everything you see around you. Whether or not we can do it artificially and controllably is another matter but nuclear fusions plays an extremely major role in energy production right today, in fact there are only very few energy sources that are not somehow a derivative of nuclear fusion.
So far we've been able to harness each and every source of power that we ever ran into, fusion will be harnessed too. The bigger question is whether or not we can do it economically.
(I hope you don't mind me copying this previous comment when the New Yorker article was on HN....)
When I read this article on ITER
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bot...
I was blown away by this passage:
> Typically, outsiders cannot comprehend how the massive expenditures never manage to yield energy. Typically, insiders cannot comprehend how little is being invested in a project that presents such immense technical obstacles and also such potential. A graph commonly passed around among the insiders—an enduring scrap of twentieth-century budgetary ephemera—depicts the 1976 federal plan to build a working thermonuclear reactor. The graph tracks various scenarios for attaining fusion energy. The “maximum” effort, the most expensive up front, with initial spending as high as nine billion dollars a year, was projected to yield a reactor by 1990. The “moderate” effort, with spending never exceeding four billion dollars in a year, would take fifteen more years. The fusion community might be easy to criticize for its many unmet milestones, but for decades the United States has never come close to even the moderate effort. In 1977, when the American fusion budget was at its peak, government investment in the research, adjusted for inflation, was seven hundred million dollars; by 1991, this had fallen by more than half. It is now half a billion, not appreciably more than the Korean budget.
The chart was produced by Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), which was later subsumed into the Department of Energy and presumably represented the expert wisdom at the time. (Please correct me if you have info that most experts were in fact more optimistic.) It can be found, in 1976 dollars, as figure 1 here:
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2...
I am having a hard time getting over the importance of this. For all the discussion of global warming, energy prices, population crunches, etc., etc., fusion is always ignored as a solution for the simple reason that people think it's unfeasibly costly. And they think that only because they think it's had a history of being grossly more expensive than promised. But if we've really known how much it would cost to get commercial fusion power since 1976, then this reasoning is completely faulty. So then if we just haven't spent the modest amount of money on it...isn't this insane? Someone please tell me what I'm missing.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bot...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-to-fix-iter
Classic case of scientists being allowed to become project managers with no training...
http://news.sciencemag.org/europe/2015/11/breaking-iter-fusi...
ITER is going to be the F-35 of science projects.
Lord, let us pray that is not true, as ITER is notorious for pushing their time tables back. Right now they are pushing 2027.
Why is it legal for government projects to lie so brazenly? Or, at the very least, make these kinds of promises.
To sum it up :
> ITER will be the first fusion device to produce net energy. You'll never get any funds (nor a high moral among the workers teams) if you frame your research project as "yet another (probably doomed) attempt at nuclear fusion energy".
Is that proven or just hopeful?
Hopeful in the sense that the pudding hasn't been eaten and in that it may take only one of these material scientists to be wrong or too optimistic to turn a 'can' into a 'cannot' (In many cases, we have never built parts at the necessary scale and tolerances, so scientists assessing whether we can build them have to extrapolate, too)
And of course, it helps for many of the scientists involved to be on the optimistic side. That possibly is a good thing, as we will never know whether we can build this if we do not try doing it.
Finally, there always is a chance that we overlook some important problem, or (less likely) that new science rears its head.
For anyone not familiar, these are eye-poppingly impressive machines:
Edit: This is a good summary from 4 years ago: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/skeptical-look-3-w... I'm looking for something more up to date.
Tri Alpha has achieved stable plasma, next step is to ramp up the temperature, which is relatively easy. According to their model the plasma should get more stable, in which case they'll move straight to an attempt at net power from aneutronic boron fusion.
Helion and General Fusion haven't released any major results but they seem to be doing well, and have good funding. Helion is attempting a mostly-aneutronic hybrid D-D/D-He3 reaction, which I think is news since four years ago.
EMC2 released a paper about a year ago: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/low-cost-fusion-...
They're looking for funding, and need about $100 million for the next step: http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/01/emc2-chief-scientist-presen...
LPP is doing a lot better with funding since their indiegogo campaign, and is working on getting the last residue of contamination out of their reactor chamber: http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/10/lpp-fusion-will-line-vacuum...
Some recent work suggest that petawatt picosecond lasers could ignite boron fusion: http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/11/picosecond-pulsed-laser-des...
The most advanced lasers have been increasing by a factor of 1000 every ten years: http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/11/generating-kilotesla-magnet...
Sandia's MagLIF got good results in 2014 and is making upgrades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetized_Liner_Inertial_Fusi...
Germany's about to turn on their stellarator. UW's Dynomak and MIT's ARC are looking for funding.
Edit: also see this IEEE Spectrum article on ARC, LPP, and fast lasers: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/three-alternative-fu...
And Scientific American has a new article covering at least one fusion company I hadn't heard of, but I don't have a full text link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-fusion-researc...
Also of course Lockheed Martin's made a splash in the press, but they haven't released much detail and fusion researchers have been fairly skeptical.
(Anecdotes from HNers can be more insightful than research papers).
Quick search found this: Fuzzy logic and support vector machine approaches to regime identification in Joint European Torus (JET), Plasma Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TPS.2006.875825.
It seems that machine learning could be used to stabilise a nuclear fusion reactor through a real-time control strategy, e.g. optimising the reactor's environment/conditions via micro-adjustments.
http://www.businessinsider.com/germany-is-turning-on-its-mon...