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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

I would bet $10,000 that the technology behind the first commercial fusion reactor does not come from ITER.

Didn't ITER offer a lot of research positions and resulted in many papers and books on fusion? Think about all the PhD students that studied there. Sounds like ITER is foundational both in knowledge and in talent for commercial fusion reactors. I know that the technical university I was in had mathematicians working on models useful for ITER.

Physicists having been maintained on a payroll will be the only material outcome of ITER, in the end, along with a likelihood of hundreds of tons of radioactive slag to dispose of. (If canceled before they light it up, it could be productively scrapped at a fractional penny on the dollar. Once it's hot, it becomes an indefinitely expensive liability.)

There are few other places just now to train up plasma fluid physicists. The main beneficiaries, though, are the contractors. This is a gravy train that just doesn't quit. The reasons so much money easily goes to it have far more to do with corporate welfare for otherwise mainly-military contractors, and maintaining a population of hot-neutron physicists ready to draw on for weapons work, than any conceivable expectation of competitive power generation.

But the main product of the Tokamak-adjacent projects is lies. They cultivate the confusion between "Q>1" meaning more kinetic energy of neutrons emitted than microwave photons injected and magnets energized, vs "Q>1" meaning electrical power to the grid exceeding grid power injected. There are at least two orders of magnitude between the two Qs. Achieving the former leaves you very, very far from the latter. ITER itself makes no pretense of ever producing so much as one watt-hour of grid power.

Thus, any system resembling ITER (particularly ITER itself) is a technological dead end. A fusion power plant that relies on hot neutrons would necessarily cost many, many times as much to build and operate as a comparable fission plant. Big fission is already not competitive (perhaps mainly from deeply entrenched official corruption, but so what?) and gets less so every day. We have yet to see whether small-scale fission can work, economically. It has failed before.

The Helion and TAE systems would be "aneutronic", generating power electromagnetically, without a side trip through neutrons, heat, and a turbine. They have a chance to be useful, because they would be cheap to operate, even at a small enough scale to leave little scope for official corruption. TAE is taking the harder road, chasing hydrogen/boron fusion, which reactants are both extremely abundant. Helion is chasing hydrogen-2/helium-3, which is more plausibly achievable, but helium-3 is very scarce, so they would need to synthesize it themselves by also fusing hydrogen-2.

The Princeton FRC reactor project, not mentioned in TFA, is working on a shoestring NASA budget, hoping to loft a 2 MW space-probe propulsion test in 2035. That might work, and they would not need much helium-3 for that. They could probably get something done much earlier if ITER were not pissing away all the money, but moving money from public to private purses (as with NASA's SLS and DoD's F-35) is ITER's true purpose.

cool story, bro.

It’s true that ITER will not produce net power and that the administrators have misled the public about the difference in Q factors. You can have a reactor which produces more thermal power than you put in to it that is still a net power drain when you factor in the rest of the plant operations to keep it going. All clearly explained in this great video.

https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY

There is a real risk that by focusing on the wrong Q factor you sink all your budget in to plants which can never work as a real power plant.

Still I am hopeful that ITER will be sufficiently valuable as a research system that we do move closer to commercial fusion power.

I don't know what kind of plasma physicists you know, but the ones I know are idealists motivated by a desire to solve one of humanity's grand challenges. They wouldn't want to touch nuclear weapons work with a 10ft pole. To the extent there's a brain drain, it's not to weapons work but to various data science type positions in industry (for twice the pay, FWIW).

As for aneutronic fusion, there are reasons to be skeptical it can even in principle be made to work (see e.g. PhD thesis by Todd Rider). I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though.

Rider's paper includes an appendix with potential ways around his main findings. At least two aneutronic projects (HB11 Energy and LPP) appear to use methods similar to those described in Rider's appendix.

Plasma physicists are not, generally, making the decisions on where money goes. I begrudge them nothing, wherever employed: plasma fluid dynamics is the hardest kind of physics, and everyone who proves they can do it deserves mad props. They are not, anyway, particularly who the weapons people want.

Any impossibility found for aneutronic fusion does nothing to improve the commercial viability of hot-neutron fusion. If aneutronic fusion can't be made to work, the outer solar system will remain a lonely place.

It most probably will come only from ITER/DEMO or similar scale project. Yes, it is drowning in the bureaucracy, politics etc. and in generic market this would be a ripe case for disruption and doing "move fast, break stuff" approach. But the fusion problem is so fundamentally hard that it is simply not possible at all in this case. Core problems like stability, preventing whole assembly becoming radioactive, actual conversion to the electricity are so impossibly hard that startup approach won't handle it, even if they had trucks with free cash queuing outside.

i don't disagree. but there are valuable side effects. like engineering technology learned. a place and economy for physicists to "work". The web came from CERN, think of all the things we got from the moonshot. we get a lot from big science projects if not the end goal.

What about all the physics and engineering knowledge that required empirical and practical experiments to test hypothesis? The technology itself might not be from ITER but the development of the knowledge for it will definitely have been impacted by ITER.

Don't really understand your point.

I think it will definitely contribute. For example SpaceX also could learn from expensive mistakes like the Space Shuttle . I think it will be the same with ITER.

Yes. Don't put wings, flaps, rudder, and landing gear on a rocket.

Except SpaceX's Starship design does include moveable wings/flaps.

I'd call them fins, which are used to orient the rocket, not provide lift.

So a rudder?

Look at the size of the rudder on the space shuttle vs the size of the fins.

The lesson that was (or at least should have been) learned from the Space Shuttle was to not develop things that are obviously from the start bad ideas (as one of von Braun's Germans lamented "they reinvented the wheel, and made it square.")

This lesson also applies to ITER.

What basis do you have for saying that it won't? Offering a fake bet isn't evidence or reason.

Probably because Wendelstein 7-X is making progress at a far faster rate than the ITER model has the current goal, without accounting for delays, for a 2050+ delivery time for the PROTO reactor.

>for a 2050+ delivery time for the PROTO reactor

when a scientist tells you 2050+ it means they don't know and everything is being made up as they go along. It means 'outside the realm of any realistic estimate, but close enough to feel tempting so you don't immediately remove funding'.

Imagine you have a software need that two contractors are working on. One says it will take 2 years. The other says 2 months, and says they are writing code faster.

Except they aren't "writing code faster" but started 8 years later and the industry now has these things like source control, GPUs and cloud computing and a new project is moving far faster with the new tools than the competing, existing project stuck in development hell that is still running in a server down the hall entirely composed Itanium 2 processors of and written in PHP 4.

One project started in 2007 planning activation in 2025 and planning reactions in 2035. The other started in 2015, activated 2017 and steady state reactions have been delayed from the original Sept 2021 plan to 2022. It's not even close the results so far.

Wendelstein is only a plasma experiment not a full reactor.

Stellarators face the same fundamental engineering showstoppers tokamaks do. They don't suffer from disruptions, but their beta is also very low, and their size will be far too large for them to be economically competitive sources of heat.

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