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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile the consortium running ITER [1] is spending €22 billion but the UK is no longer a member because we left the EU. For engineering at this scale, cooperation is going to get results - not small projects like this.

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Those are very different projects with very different goals. ITER is designed conservatively to produce 10x fusion energy output vs electrical energy input. As in you out 1 MW of electricity in and get 1 + 10 = 11MW of heat output. While not designed to be an economic fusion system it would unequivocally demonstrate a working design and a provide a test bed for experiments relating to reactor materials and full scale operations.

This however is aimed to explore novel geometries which may aid in future designs. However, the net efficiency at this scale would be vastly lower. It’s still a useful project, but it’s just one of many possible designs.

Why would it not be economic?

After the first reactor, do we expect building a replica, without all the R&D costs would be significantly more expensive than a standard nuclear reactor?

To me, 10x the energy sounds really good.

10x energy doesnt mean 10x electricity. How one captures that energy and converts it effectively remains an open question. Can all those particles be turned into heat? Will those particles degrade the reactor so fast that it is no longer economically viable?

ITER seems to be addressing the "capture the energy" part?

https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork

"The neutrons will be absorbed by the surrounding walls of the tokamak, where their kinetic energy will be transferred to the walls as heat. In ITER, this heat will be captured by cooling water circulating in the vessel walls and eventually dispersed through cooling towers. In the type of fusion power plant envisaged for the second half of this century, the heat will be used to produce steam and—by way of turbines and alternators—electricity."

And without breeding blankets, yes you can capture the heat, but you rapidly run out of tritium. ITER will only be operate on DT for a few weeks, total over its lifetime, before the available tritium supply is exhausted (and its materials reach their neutron limits).

A "real" reactor will need to have tritium breeding blankets to regenerate the tritium. Otherwise, the cost of tritium alone, if made in fission reactors, for a 1 GW(e) DT fusion reactor would be $15B/year.

Isn't testing that approach of breeding tritium explicitly part of what ITER is trying to do with its TBM programme?

ITER has a few places where test blanket modules can be installed. ITER will not be able to simulate the neutronic environment of a full reactor (and so will not be able to confirm adequate breeding), nor subject the modules to the cumulative neutron loading they will have to withstand.

For this reason, a Fusion Nuclear Science Facility has long been proposed as something that will be needed before DEMO is built. This could be a small, Q < 1 DT fusion device, as the goal would not be plasma physics related. It itself will need to breed its own tritium to operate long enough, so there's a circular dependency in the development.

There are many such technology advances needed for fusion power to work. This is why spending $22 billion on ITER is a very inefficient use of money for research. Maybe as a diplomatic effort of having all the world's major powers [] (China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States) work together it is worth it. Sort of like the space station. Big symbol and cost but little scientific value per dollar.

Unfortunately the budget for ITER comes out of the US science budget instead of the State Department. Most US fusion funding only goes to ITER at this point.

Fusion blankets are not just needed for fusion to work, they are needed for the next fusion reactor experiment (the one that has a burning plasma) to run. This is not a technology that we'll need some day for commercialization; it's a requirement for DT fusion to progress at all.

That's not capturing in a utility sense, it's merely preventing system failure from overheat (edit: autocorrect was turning this into "merrily preventing" which was kind of fitting as well). The result is a high volume, low delta-T coolant cycle and those are notoriously difficult (read: impossible) to capture meaningful amounts of electricity from, it will actually consume a lot. That quote is just a slightly more elaborate way of saying: no, we'll definitely not do any utilizeable capture.

How is what they just said any different than a standard nuclear reactor that just heats up water to produce steam into electricity?

Because ITER is not designed to be running for more than a few minutes at a time. Its successor, DEMO, will be designed for continuous power output.

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

It's not 10-11MW heat out for 1MW electricity in. It's "500 MW plasma from 50 MW of injected thermal power" which would need 300 MW electrical input. After conversion back to electricity, it might give as much electricity out as is put in!

See these links for more: Question asked in the EU parliament: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-00081...

https://news.newenergytimes.net/2020/11/03/open-letter-to-it...

Useful clarification, but I think ITER’s website makes it unambiguous.

For 50 MW of injected heating power it will produce 500 MW of fusion power for long pulses of 400 to 600 seconds. https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals. To be more clear, injected heating power excludes the energy required to get to a steady state, as otherwise pulse length needs to be factored in.

That said ITER is running a lot of equipment unnecessary for a commercial power plant making engendering Q factors misleading. For example a power plant would not need to collect, process, and store the vast amount of scientific data that’s the point of the experiment. It’s really better if their not turning the rooms lights off trying to hit some arbitrary target.

PS: It was posted ~3AM and I am still out of it. So, I am kind of surprised how coherent that was even though I mess up conveying some heat was from electricity where the other heat was from fusion.

I’m not sure if you can quite say the UK has left.

The UK is part of ITER via Euratom, which requires EU membership. It seems the UK is in a grace period for the time being, but hasnt quite left:

https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3394

I thought the UK has left, giving notice for Euratom explicitly at the same time as for the EU because the UK government wasn’t sure leaving Euratom would be automatic? And that Switzerland was a participating associated state?

From the ITER link, the UK has left Euratom, but not fully left ITER due to a grace period, with the hope that the UK will in some way join ITER.

As I understand it from the links I’ve found the UK has not explicitly left ITER yet.

Ah, looks like I misunderstood your initial post, I incorrectly thought you were saying the UK was still in Euratom. My bad. :)

UK leaving EURATOM was widely criticised, I struggle to see how it makes any sence to leave an purely technical institution that has nothing to do with brexit.

The UK left Euratom on 31st January 2020.

But ITER is not EU only, having the US and other countries, so they might still participate

(Regardless of the merits of ITER of course)

If the UK wanted to I'm sure that they could stay in ITER considering that "third countries" (ie. non EU) like China are major participants.

You make it sound like Brexit is some sort of rational process based on what's best for the UK. That seems pretty far from the truth.

I've checked ITER's details and it's a truly international project, just that the EU is a member rather than member states individually.

All major powers are members (EU, US, Russia, India, Japan) and it would be disturbing (at least to me) if the UK walked away...

Counterpoint: is there an obligation to share in ITER such that walking away could produce competitive advantage, or are there no such restrictions on non-ITER national projects?

Doing what you promised based a referendum is "what's best for the UK". What constitutes rationality in a democratic process is a matter of opinion - and the point is no one is allowed a privileged opinion over consensus.

Funny you should say that because the Tory election promise for the referendum was that they would give a referendum on the deal they arranged ... so, not "what [they] promised" in a pretty key way.

Also I'm pretty sure they promised not to break the Good Friday Agreement; and it seems clear they don't care.

That aside, the whole point of having a representative democracy was supposed to be that expert politicians could act on the public's behalf in complex arrangements. The vast majority of MPs (including ex-PM May, for example) supported UK staying in the EU ...

Then there's things like how almost all countries have rules requiring a supermajority in any vote leading to major constitutional change ... but the advisory vote of the referendum was passed on the slimmest of margins. If the vote has been "leave with no deal" then the Leave, camp (funded heavily by a Russian oligarch as we now know) would have lost the vote.

The whole point of our UK democracy was supposed to be to allow complex decisions to be made without simplistic populism.

The economic experts, the scientific experts, the political experts, the legal experts ... amongst these groups the consensus was very clearly for remaining in the EU. It was an act of subversion to arrange a referendum with no clear aim (contrary to the election manifesto) in which the population could be swayed with simple lies.

It hasn't even brought the much maligned sovereignty, instead we had an unlawful prorogation of parliament and because of the removal of oversight the current Covid19 crisis has been used to route 100s of £millions to Tory owned corporations under the guise of buying PPE which simply hasn't been delivered (or has and had been deficient ... but that's no surprise, none of these companies were previously PPE suppliers).

What constitutes rationality in a democracy surely is open, fair, and democratic as a first step. It's truthful and forthright. These words do not fit this process at all.

Convincing people through lies to vote against their own interests isn't democracy.

Convince me.

[These views are my own and do not relate to my employment.]

So, allow the GFA to hold the rest of the country hostage? Maybe such considerations should have been made when britain joined the EU - I voted for brexit, but I had no choice on whether to join. It's been argued that the current generation has no right to make such an impactful action as brexit, but why is it such that a single generation can sign up to such an alliance without an exit plan in the first place?

> expert politicians could act on the public's behalf in complex arrangements

And yet do they? How much does the public trust the motivations of their politicians? It seems to me that the public inherits an old and cludgy system, and you'd have to spend multiple lifetimes fighting it to have a chance of change. That the majority needed to accept the leadership of a clown like Boris shows how little the political class represents its public.

> funded heavily by a Russian

As opposed to public funds? Or English oligarchs?

There are many factors that could affect the vote; having a goverment that represents, rather than manipulates, the public for instance.

> without simplistic populism

What about simplistic dismissals of brexit as racist/xenophobic. So many characterisations of the EU as the spirit of cooperation; where is the scepticism towards large political unions, democratic divide and conquer, and the forgotten fact that the EU is still an elitist institution despite whatever diversity you might think it has.

> economic experts, the scientific experts, the political experts, the legal experts

There are winners and losers in brexit. The biggest losers tend to be lower paid, lower class demographics who where fed promises (lies) about how joining the EU would help them somehow. The biggest winners are businesses who can squeeze those lower classes, and middle class professionals (who started off with greater mobility in the first place). Guess which camp economists, scientists, politicians and lawyers fall into...

> Convincing people through lies to vote against their own interests isn't democracy

Who convinced people through lies? And since when is that acted on? I dont recall anyone suggesting we be able to kick out Thatcher when she turned on the miners. The issue is, the public don't seem to get to decide when to hold a referendum, nor control the narrative of whether it is appropriate to do so; hence thd suggestion yhe Brexit is based on lied, when in fact any/all referendums are.

In any case, how does brexit relate specidically to that. For whatever democracy is worth the EU will fix nothing of the rot in britain or its politics, but joining the EU is likely to make it worse. Reforming the electoral system might be a start, hopefully both Tories and neo-tories aka labour will die, but that's a scope beyond.

ITER isn't all it's cracked up to be. Certainly some senior fusion scientists don't believe so: https://thebulletin.org/2018/02/iter-is-a-showcase-for-the-d...

Only half way through the article, but the issue does not appear to be that ITER project in praticular has a glaring flaw.

Rather, the scientist appears to be sceptical of fusion as a near term practical energy source on the whole.

I feel that humanity will never amount to anything without fusion.

Energy requirements of space travel assure of that.

DT fusion is bad for space travel. The reactors are simply too large, and burn only a small fraction of their mass in fuel before they are too damaged to continue. ITER, for example, if it could be operated continuously forever (it cannot) would take 300,000 years to fuse its own mass in fuel.

I see DT fusion as a stepping stone to evolution. It doesn't have to be the answer for space travel or even Earth's clean energy.

If within a few thousand years we managed to go from illiteracy to studying fusion, I'm hopeful of what can be achieved within the next few thousand years.

Evolution explores huge numbers of dead ends. So if we go with that metaphor, the most likely fate of fusion is failure and extinction.

"would take 300,000 years to fuse its own mass in fuel."

Most of ITER's mass is concrete in the building, are you including that?

I was using the described ITER mass of 23,000 tonnes. The concrete structure around ITER contains 30,000 tonnes of rebar and 150,000 cubic meters of concrete.

Tokamaks are good for science and understanding the physics of plasmas, but seem to be particularly unfriendly to utilising the energy produced by fusion. The materials in the reactor become radioactive and need replacing frequently, diverting the heat out is tricky, but not impossible, as it is essentially a sealed ring.

I certainly agree that fusion would be the biggest thing to happen to civilization. It would help us to clean this planet, and get to others.

i am not sure but in the promo video they say that the data coming out of this project is fed into ITER, which is the whole purpose of this project supposedly to collect data

The video in the link clearly states (2:37) that data from this experiment will feed directly into ITER.

Advances in high temperature superconductors have made ITER obsolete before it will be finished. They won't ever be able to produce electricity, whereas the current generation of fusion reactor designs have a decent shot at it. Though it would be politically difficult, it likely would be pragmatic to scrap the current design and start over.

I think this is more comparable in goals to the Wendelstein 7-X project.

Sure, but the article does mention that results from MAST Upgrade feedback into preparations for ITER.

It's not either-or.

DISAGREE on this. Real innovation happens bottoms up. co-operation at national level is all a spectacle.

You might be right on this one. I'm a bit curious if any other HN-reader is aware of the private fusion project (aka the SAFIRE project) which is now run by the company Aureon Energy (https://aureon.ca/). I do highly recommend watching the video (also available on the legacy page https://safireproject.com/) for the video recording of the experiments. It's not yet quite mainstream physics but we have to remember that once upon the time the mainstream physics people didn't think that heavier-than-air flying machines are possible while nowadays they have wasted countless billions on their fusion experiments and achieved close to nothing.

> we have to remember that once upon the time the mainstream physics people didn't think that heavier-than-air flying machines are possible while nowadays they have wasted countless billions on their fusion experiments and achieved close to nothing

Challenging authority gets you cool-guy points, but does nothing for actual understanding. “The experts don’t know what they’re talking about and are blinded by tribalism” is rhetoric of the 20th century. Physics has moved on.

So you say. Though I don't see any evidence humanity as a whole has moved past groupthink. But yeah, I might be wrong about SAFIRE, as I haven't done any fusion experiments myself, just read a bit of research.

I work with fusion researchers. We regularly talk about non-mainstream designs and unexplored areas of physics. It’s a lot of fun. The mainstream is mainstream because it’s what works, not because that’s what our fathers built. The theoretical physicists are actively working on a dozen empirical models. They throw out what they need to. No one’s saying “don’t fund alternatives”. Fund alternatives. Show that they work. They haven’t in the past, but if one did the most excited people will be the mainstream fusion researchers.

Hey, I'd really appreciate it if you were to bring up my design next time you're chatting about new and different designs.

This one is completely new, very simple, and in great need of more eyes

I have a website at http://www.ddprofusion.com

  “The experts don’t know what they’re talking about and are blinded by tribalism” is rhetoric of the 20th century.

How would you describe the medical abuses of the last century? e.g. lobotomies to cure mental conditions, refusal of surgeons to wash hands etc.

Have scientists moved on from tribalism?

I said physics has moved on.

Also, if experimental surgeries were never attempted in the 20th century the quality and length of our lives, and potentially trillions of future human lives, would be nasty, brutish, and short. Not all attempts had a sound basis and I don’t defend them. I do say the good of the total if 20th century experimental surgeries far outweighs the bad. Importantly, we are able to learn from our mistakes quickly. It took centuries to stop using the breaking wheel. It took less than a lifetime to stop lobotomies.

I’m struggling to understand your point though. Do doctors still practice lobotomies and refuse to wash hands, or have they cast aside their tribalism and make decisions based on science?

I am used to hearing this from software engineers who are secure in the knowledge that when they want to try out a concept, hardware time to do so will be cheap and readily available. At some point, you are going to have to take all of your shiny materials science and turbulence simulations, and actually build a piece of apparatus to test it out on the scale that your chosen application (in this case, power generation) will require. The universe is under no obligation to make sure that it will cost less than billions to do so; hence ITER.

Having said that, there's been a lot of extremely promising recent progress in high field superconductors and fusion designs based on them (MIT ARC, Tokamak Energy, etc) that could shrink the necessary scale for a working reactor, so perhaps it will turn out we're lucky with the physics on this one after all.

you have answered your own question. cool.

Kind of ironic to post this on the web, given it's history.

> Kind of ironic to post this on the web, given it's history.

it's funny because you think it happened because tim berners lee and CERN. I think, it happened because arpanet and universities connecting with each other.

Internet wasn't an organised effort. it was a bottoms up manifestation. Do i need to remind you what CERN was actually supposed to do?

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