The Iter Fusion Reactor
April 27th, 2013Fusion power has been 20-years-away since the 1950s. And now, “Commercial reactors could not realistically be built until the second half of the century.”
As I was chortling about this, it reminded me of a song from the olden days.
The pursuit of this pipedream makes sense, though, if the goal is to keep masses of people heavily taxed and dependent on a centralized, Soviet style energy infrastructure.
Via: Independent:
An idyllic hilltop setting in the Cadarache forest of Provence in the south of France has become the site of an ambitious attempt to harness the nuclear power of the sun and stars.
It is the place where 34 nations representing more than half the world’s population have joined forces in the biggest scientific collaboration on the planet – only the International Space Station is bigger.
The international nuclear fusion project – known as Iter, meaning “the way” in Latin – is designed to demonstrate a new kind of nuclear reactor capable of producing unlimited supplies of cheap, clean, safe and sustainable electricity from atomic fusion.
If Iter demonstrates that it is possible to build commercially-viable fusion reactors then it could become the experiment that saved the world in a century threatened by climate change and an expected three-fold increase in global energy demand.
This week the project gained final approval for the design of the most technically challenging component – the fusion reactor’s “blanket” that will handle the super-heated nuclear fuel.
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As the components of the tokamak arrive in the coming years, Iter engineers will be holding their breaths to make sure the parts fit together perfectly. But even if “first plasma” happens within the next 10 years, it will still be another five years or more before they have the confidence to put radioactive tritium fuel into the vacuum vessel – and go nuclear.
Even if everything goes to plan, the first demonstration power plant using nuclear fusion will not be ready until at least the 2030s, meaning commercial reactors could not realistically be built until the second half of the century.
I have been following this topic over the years and, from what I understand, this is indeed the biggest and most costly piece of waste ever created. It is already known that tokomak design is doomed to fail from the start. They have a fatal flaw: The more you raise the temnperature of the plasma inside it, the less you can keep it contained. So what happen is that the plasma will always end up hitting the wall of the tokamak, thus killing the fusion reaction (and damaging part of the reactor at the same time). This will usually happen within minutes of the reaction starting (less then 5 min for Iter).
So at a cost over 20 billions US dollars (if there are no cost overrun over the 20 year building time), this is total madness. In 2030, they will acheive their minute of fusion and claim a success. Then they will announce that they need a machine bigger and more powerful then Iter. They call it DEMO. They expect to enter the “age of fusion” by 2075!
It looks like the real way to fusion is with the american Z-machine. They acheived a temperature of over 3 billion Celcius (Only 150 millions Celcius will be acheive for ITER) in 2006. More then enough to produce the fusion reactions that are really clean (no radiation output at all). Also, the estimated cost are about 100 millions. Way less then ITER. Since 2006 though, we haven’t heard a lot from the team (fusion wise). They even tried to backtrack on there announcement about acheived temperature, but It was already to late, the cat is out of the bag.
My guess is that, As with the fission in 1945, it is probably the bombs before the plants.