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Comment by rococode | Hacker News Reader

You seem to know what you're talking about - do you know what the end goal of the work in this field is? Is it working towards nuclear fusion as an energy source?

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The specific EAST reactor [1] mentioned in the article is a testbed that will enable new technologies to be used on the ITER project. The ITER project [2] is currently the largest fusion power research project underway (and the largest reactor under construction). ITER's goal is to provide research that enables new technologies to be used on the DEMO project. The DEMO project's goal [3] is to provide commercially available power plants utilizing nuclear fusion.

From ITER's wikipedia page:

>The goal of ITER is to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy for peaceful use. It is the latest and largest of more than 100 fusion reactors built since the 1950s. ITER's planned successor, DEMO, is expected to be the first fusion reactor to produce electricity in an experimental environment. DEMO's anticipated success is expected to lead to full-scale electricity-producing fusion power stations and future commercial reactors.

And from DEMO's wikipedia page:

>As a prototype commercial fusion reactor, DEMO could make fusion energy available by 2033.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Advanced_Supercon...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station

Any idea on how much money we're spending on this?

Also, I can imagine it's a joint project only partially because we can share the cost, I imagine another reason to work together is so that no one country gets this technology first.

Several billions of Euros, with Europe paying the largest share, but the reactor is in France so we get much of the secondary benefit (i.e. scientists and engineers spending their salaries there, construction work).

http://www.iter.org/faq (several are relevant).

Initial budget was €5bn. Current budget is four times that and with completion nowhere near estimates of the final cost are as high as $60bn. Go figure.

If by "we" you mean US's share, that's 9% of total costs. China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the US are paying 9% each and EU is paying 46%.

With 'we' I meant every country that's involved, not just my own country.

$60bn is actually surprisingly little for research that could change the future of energy production and possibly society as we know it. To put it into context, the Apollo program cost $200bn in today's money and a high speed train between LA and SF is projected to cost $100bn.

And the war in Iraq $1 trillion :(

Yup. I purposefully didn't mention it, because it can lead to distracting political discussions, unfortunately.

Unfortunately, it did change the future, just not in the way its planners thought.

$1 trillion is not a lot of money for the US. the Congressional Budget Office estimates that interest spending on US public debt will hit $915 billion in 2028[1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-on-a-course-to-spend-more-o...

That doesn't mean 1 trillion isn't a large amount of money. That means the US spends a trillion dollars servicing it's debt. As it so happens, the US will be spending a lot of money servicing debt.

That’s a very misleading figure as inflation both directly reduces the actual debt payment nessisary, and makes comparisons between spending 2003 – 2011 vs 2028 difficult to compare.

except inflation is directly related to the amount of new debt issued, because thats the only source of M1 money supply. If the US Treasury didn't borrow from the Federal Reserve and instead printed its own currency, this would be different.

The FED can create money from thin air when banks fail. So, debt is not the only source of M1 money supply.

1 trillion dollars is 3070 dollars per American citizen. That's like 9% of my annual gross, that's a lot of money.

It's interesting to note that on the ITER FAQ page, they mention that 90% of contributions are to be delivered "in-kind" in the form of parts of buildings, instead of cash.

> The DEMO project's goal [3] is to provide commercially available power plants utilizing nuclear fusion

That's not true unfortunately. Yep it's planned to be attached to the grid, but it won't be a production-ready power station. That will be PROTO [1].

Basically the whole schedule slipped more, US pulled out of ITER so they had to scale it down, then it was delayed, so as things stand now DEMO will still be a testbed. Some recent DEMO design notes can be found here [2]. A bit dated, but if anything an optimistic outlook can be found here [3] at page 8. Note that DEMO is though to "resolve" some issues still.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTO_(fusion_reactor)

[2]: http://www.firefusionpower.org/NAS_EU_DEMO_Federici.pdf

[3]: https://fire.pppl.gov/eu_demo_Stork_FZK%20.pdf

Since the 1970s it's been customary to report that fusion power will happen "in about 25 years". So, traditionally, 2043.

but 2033 is only 15 years away, not 20

I think calling 2033 highly unlikely would be an understatement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER: ”Initial plasma experiments are scheduled to begin in 2025, with full deuterium–tritium fusion experiments starting in 2035.”

So, according to Wikipedia, DEMO will build on ITER’s results, but will produce energy before ITER’s first real fusion experiment starts.

If global warming will be more significant then is predicted now I believe they will suddenly invest 100x more into this technology. This and nuclear plants are only reasonable way how to have available energy for some 'CO2 removal' projects...

Is money more limiting than time though? Nine woman and a child analogy comes to mind.

Fusion is notoriously underfunded.

More money means you can buy better gear, hire more workers, complete projects faster and run multiple parallel sites to complete various goals at the same time.

Of course there is some point where adding more funding will not advance the speed as much anymore but I doubt were even close to that point at the moment.

Why is it so underfunded? The first country to build one will be taking a big step to reducing their dependence on other countries for energy. I can understand big oil exporters not wanting to push it too much (although it's unlikely to come into fruition for the current generation of politians), but for others isn't it a no brainer?

Historically, Fusion has been bad at predicting when it's going to be ready for prime time, that plus very early fusion experiments turned out to be a lot of duds. Just think of the Cold Fusion hype (on a side note; cold fusion does work, µCF replaces electrons with muons in the hydrogen atom which reduces the radius of the atomic nucleus such that fusion becomes possible at room temperature and far below but generating the necessary muons is a fools game) and the various other nuclear fusion failures.

Fission on the other hand could report a lot of results and success and, at the time, seemed to be infallibly safe.

Same reason preventative medicine is not practiced. The upfront costs are great and the out come not certain leaving many hesitant to invest in something they may never benefit from. Especially if your country has more immediate pressing matters that you could fix right now with that money.

Another (completely stupid) reason is that it's "nuclear" energy. The general public has a hard time understanding that fusion and fission have very different risk profiles. I recall that after Fukushima some countries cut their budget for fusion research because nuclear energy is clearly bad and unpopular.

>Why is it so underfunded?

- Oil/coal/natural gas lobbyists and interests which hinder tax payer funded research.

- The fact that there is no guarantee we will ever figure it out and no idea whatsoever as to how much it will cost to figure it out. Investors like returns, in their lifetime, leaving largely tax payer funded research as the greatest source of funds... see above.

And then with government-funded research... if a government figures out fusion, what do you do with it? Do you license it to private industry? Do you make state-owned power plants?

If you give it to private it industry, it's going to get to other nations. If it gets to other nations, you lose non-electrical power and create potential strategic issues, which means you are motivated NOT to share the technology.

It sucks.

I wish we could all just get along, fund stuff like this and space exploration, and get over petty politics before our species goes extinct.

I'd argue fusion is actually overfunded, if you go by its likelihood to actually deliver a competitive source of energy. A clean sheet energy R&D program would invest very little in nuclear fusion.

Given climate change, giving it to other nations is exactly the right thing to do, even from a purely self-interested perspective. Nobody wins if coal plants in China tip us into runaway warming.

And that's another reason ITER et al are very broad international projects: everyone wins when the project wins, and nobody can stall one project by poaching Von Braun for their own scheme.

Because we already have a functioning fusion reactor.

Utility-scale PV now costs only $43/MWh. Investing in developing fusion reactors makes very little economic sense compared with capturing the output of the fusion reactor we already have.

The research should still be done, of course. It can have benefits to a future interstellar civilization - but until we're interstellar, PV is far, far more compelling.

We have a functioning fusion reactor for some portion of the day. It has a really annoying duty cycle though.

Cheap intermittent sources are sufficient to destroy the economic case for expensive baseload sources. The latter have to be able to sell their output most of the time or else their economic case collapses entirely.

Nine women can't have one child faster, but on average they can have about nine times as many children in nine months as one woman. It really depends what your goal is and the bottleneck in reaching that goal whether or not that analogy holds.

Sustainable high-temperature plasma is what we need to create fusion as an energy source. Current fusion processes rely on pulsing a very short instant of high temperature. This creates a brief instance of fusion, but takes heaps more energy than that quick moment of fusion releases. Thus, it's a net negative of energy. One way to do this that the US uses for nuclear weapons research is to zap a small bit of gas with a tonne of high energy lasers all at the same instant.

A high temperature plasma represents a continuous supply of fusing atoms. The current research at ITER, this place, etc. are attempts to create a persistent environment for fusion. If they can do that, then it creates an environment where research can focus on 1) reduce the energy required to hold it at that temperature (which includes limiting how much plasma leaks out, since leaking plasma drops the temperature), and 2) work out ways to extract the energy created by fusion.

As I understand (and I could be wrong, it's been years since I last read about it), ITER plans to generate a net-negative energy situation (i.e. it'll never produce energy, just consume it) but hopes to create a sustainable plasma field at temperatures that cause fusion.

ITER will never produce electric energy but they plan to achieve Q=5, ie, output 5 times more energy than put in.

The more important work on ITER is work around enabling actual power stations using Q=5 and developing the tech to maintain operating fusion reactors (remote robots, etc.)

At that point can't you just store the output current in supercapacitors for later use anyway? You can even feed it into the machine itself. Supercapacitors easily have better than 20% efficiency for each cycle.

No, ITER doesn't have any planned way to make electricity, the power it outputs will be largely thermal and radiative. Engineers will likely put up a cooling system to measure the thermal output, especially after putting up the various ways to turn the major neutron radiation into heat (which is a fun way to produce energy with rare materials as a byproduct).

DEMO, to my knowledge, will then include an actual electric generator to be hooked up to the fusion core.

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