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Comment by pablobaz | Hacker News Reader

ITER is not a power station it is a research project.

In other news Wright brothers first plane unsuitable for transatlantic business travel. Colossus struggles to run Call of Duty.

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I had that same criticism in my head while reading the first half of the article that mainly discusses the energy use of the project. That criticism was dispelled in the second half where fundamental problems with fusion reactors are discussed.

This article will certainly not cause me to dismiss fusion as a potential energy source outright, but it makes it very clear that even with ITER up and running, we are nowhere near being able to use fusion for energy generation. [1]

To pick up your analogy: It took only 1-2 decades to get from the Wright brothers to commercial aircrafts. In that sense, ITER looks more akin to one of Da Vinci's flying machines.

[1] Which makes me wonder about the buzz about Lockheed-Martin's skunkworks fusion projects.

All the size objections at least are just due to ITER being an obsolete design. MIT's ARC would use the same plasma physics and would have the same power output, but in a 10X smaller package by using modern superconductors.

There are also lots of alternative designs (including LM's); they have higher scientific risk because the plasma physics isn't understood as well, but may be more practical if they work out.

This is a good point, thank you for bringing it up.

I watched a talk by one of the MIT people on this, and their case is tremendously compelling. This is particularly true when you compare it to the pitfalls of the ITER project.

At some point, your megaproject is just too flawed and too out of date to make sense on its own. ITER's consumption of Tritium may do more to damage the future of fusion power than what it offers in terms of understanding of the plasma.

Sure, the newer designs are risky, but how is ITER not risky? Any decent risk analysis needs to look at things in terms of alternatives. I think ITER will give important knowledge in terms of plasma physics, I just cannot begin to fathom how that is worth the 10s of Billions and waiting 2 decades to get it.

The tragedy of megaprojects comes in the form of opportunity cost.

I had similar thoughts after watching the MIT video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4). It would seem to make sense to scrap the $20bn ITER abd build MITs proposed $300m SPARC prototype instead https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/10/mit-set-nuclear-fusion...

Quicker to make, cheaper, more modern tech and much closer to a possible commercial design.

Sunk cost fallacy.

ITER is about farm more than just plasma physics. Tritium breeding from lithium is critical for any D-T reactor design and requires taking the vessel apart remotely and processing the blanket because of it's half life. That's just one of the many things involved and why you want a 'safe' design.

That's an excellent point, and this topic was specifically dealt with in the article.

> Just 2 percent of the neutrons will be intercepted by test modules for investigating tritium production in lithium, but 98 percent of the neutron streams will simply smash into the reactor walls or into devices in port openings.

It kind of sounds like they're not sure if breeding will work in this kind of reactor design. If not, I guess D-T fusion is just off the table as an option generally? If that's true, this technology track simply doesn't work for the purpose of energy production.

Maybe I'm being too unfair? Maybe these test modules are exactly what's needed, maybe a larger area of the modules would have costed too much. That just seems like a strange argument. I don't feel like I can make heads or tails of this. It just feels suspicious.

ARC handles breeding by using FLiBe, a molten salt coolant containing lithium. No disassembly required to harvest the tritium.

You can't really use liquids around plasma. You can try to have liquid lithium behind inside a solid container, but wall thickness directly relates to wall lifetime AND you want the thinnest walls possible to maximize tritium production.

Worldwide Tritium production is on the order of 1 lb per year, that's not going to cut it when you want to scale up.

There's a solid inner reactor wall. It's 3-D printed and replaced once a year; the reactor has a modular design that makes it easy to do that.

Exactly, replaced once a year that's easy to write but very hard to actually accomplish.

Just like ITER it's extremely radioactive during that process, so you need to handle all of that remotely and your reactor design must be capable of both opening and closing regularly.

Sure, it does not seem as sexy as superconductors, plasma, etc but it's a surprisingly hard problem.

PS: My point about not scaling up Tritium production just means reactor designs need to be net possessive Tritium producers, which is why the walls need to be thin and swapped out regularly.

One thing that makes it relatively easy to open the reactor is that the superconducting tapes can have joints without significant resistance, instead of being a continuous wrapping. They've tested the joints to make sure of this.

Here's a rendering showing how the reactor is put together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efOlmF3wjJE

The first point about the energy used to actually build ITER really does the article a disservice IMO. I mean you could make the same point about the LHC or basically any kind of big scientific project, it feels shortsighted and besides the point.

The rest of the article is more insightful, although if you followed discussions around ITER and tokamak technologies there's nothing really new in there. We're trying to put the sun in a box but we don't know how to build the box.

Hi friend.

If I may? If you want to do footnotes on HN you can use the dagger symbol, like so†. Dagger is Unicode U+2020 which you can read about here[1]. Asterisk is out of bounds because it is typographically significant in Markdown and dagger is the next in the order[2].

It's just that conventionally numbers enclosed by [] are used for non-inline hyperlinks (denoting cited references) in order to not clutter up the text with incomprehensible and long URLs. I think this is from text email culture but it could go back even further, I am not sure about that.

Apologies for the persnicketiness.

[1] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2020/index.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_(typography)#Numbering_an...

† I am a footnote indexed by a dagger. On Linux at least you can enter Unicode by using the key combo Ctlr-Shift-u and keying in the appropriate number. Dagger is easy to remember because it is 2020.

I like daggers as much as the next guy (do you know the code for double dagger when you need a second one). However plenty of publications mix footnote citations and footnote comments in the same style without any confusion or aesthetic issues. Is there a good reason (other than coolness) to use dagger?

I was operating under the impression that a single asterisk would muck up the Markdown parsing on HN. Turns out I'm half wrong it seems. Some work. With the italicised tests below, the first has a prepended asterisk, the second has an appended one.

* Test

Test*

Test

Test *

I think I just started using daggers because U+2020 was super easy to remember and to avoid Markdown issues and the habit has stuck.

You don't by any chance use Vim, do you?

I use the Unicode plugin[0] by Christian Brabandt in Vim to quickly search for Unicode characters.

You can use vim-plug[1][2] by Junegunn Choi, for instance, to install it and keep it updated or just install it manually yourself.

   call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')

   Plug 'https://github.com/chrisbra/unicode.vim'

   call plug#end()

Then within vim type :UnicodeSearch dagger to search for daggers. This gives me:

   †    U+2020 Dec:008224        DAGGER (/-) &dagger;
   ‡    U+2021 Dec:008225        DOUBLE DAGGER (/=) &Dagger; &ddagger;
   ⸶    U+2E36 Dec:011830        DAGGER WITH LEFT GUARD &#x2E36;
   ⸷    U+2E37 Dec:011831        DAGGER WITH RIGHT GUARD &#x2E37;
   ⸸    U+2E38 Dec:011832        TURNED DAGGER &#x2E38;
       U+1F5E1 Dec:128481       DAGGER KNIFE &#x1F5E1;

[0] https://github.com/chrisbra/unicode.vim

[1] https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug

[2] https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug/wiki/tips#automatic-ins...

This is almost definitely not the place to be experimenting with HN mark[down|up].

Where would you suggest?

I use spacemacs, which has the equivalent M-x insert-char.

What's far more interesting has little to do with ITER. Who is paying for these hit peaces?

His last peace was linked and had a long diatribe about this issues with tritium breading starts with "the most comprehensive analyses indicate that there can be up to a 15 percent surplus in regenerating tritium." Adds plenty of "cannot make up" etc and ends with "approximately 10 percent of the injected tritium was never recovered."

1.15 * 0.9 > 1

Looking at them both they are very careful not to directly lie while being as misleading as possible.

> Who is paying for these hit pieces?

https://thebulletin.org/ is an anti-nuclear activist organization. Producing articles like this are its function. It lists its funders in its annual report ... https://thebulletin.org/annual-report

This puzzles me immensely since nuclear fusion is far more save than nuclear fission. So if you're an organization opposed to the dangers of nuclear, wouldn't you, pragmatically, want a less-harmful alternative to exist?

> ITER is not a power station it is a research project.

That it is not, and that there is no such thing yet, is itself testimony to the difficulties of fusion. I wish it were otherwise, but these are the facts.

On the other hand, the author is being misleading when he considers ITER as if it were a power plant, except where he can show that its problems are inescapable problems of any plausible fusion-power scheme.

If / when it becomes possible to build fusion power plants, these problems should be weighed against the alternatives, such as the undeniable (though often denied) problems of climate change.

I notice that the author became convinced of the futility of fusion research only after his income became in no way dependent on society's hopes and expectations for it.

> I notice that the author became convinced of the futility of fusion research only after his income became in no way dependent on society's hopes and expectations for it.

I notice that lots of people can give highly detailed accountings of their ex-spouses failings as an individual post-divorce than they would have pre-divorce. Perhaps it's because their income is no longer dependant on their ex, or perhaps it's because they're no longer under the influence of infatuation...

A stupendous amount of our energy "debate" is emotional and fantasy driven, not deeply related to pragmatic low carbon energy production at meaningful scales. I speculate this is related to messaging and disinformation campaigns from entrenched interests, but maybe youthful idealisation and generalized ignorance is a larger contributor...

Yep. They are doing fundamental research. Maybe it will have practical applications. Maybe not. Sometimes you should just give scientists a bag of money and let them do their thing.

> ITER is not a power station it is a research project

And the article states this pretty clearly. Much more clearly than the ITER website and slogan of "Unlimited Energy".

Unlimited energy should refer to the input, not the output (of which there will be none).

ITER is a political project. Its purpose is to transform research money into jobs or contracts for building companies.

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