The ITER (International Tokomak) fusion reactor currently being built in France will not achieve first operation until 2034 – almost a decade later than previously planned and some 50 years after the project was first conceived in 1985. The decision by ITER management to take another 10 years constructing the machine means that the first experiments using burning fusion fuel – a mixture of deuterium and tritium (D–T) – will now have to wait until 2039.
The goal is to generate about 500 MW of fusion power over 400 seconds using a plasma heating of 50 MW, a power gain of 10. The reactor would also test a “steady state” operation under a power gain of five.
In 2016, a baseline was presented in which the first deuterium plasma would be delayed until 2025. In 2020, it was clear that the 2025 first plasma date was no longer achievable. The COVID-19 pandemic led to supply-chain and quality-control delays. Manufacturing issues also emerged such as the discovery of cracks in the water pipes that cool the thermal shields. The delay will cost an extra €5 billion.
Nextbigfuture has said for over 15 years that the ITER tokomak project was a waste of time and resources. The ITER even if successful would be a baseball stadium sized device that would need another 50 years of a DEMO project to get closer to a useful reaction, then manybe a real commercial prototype and then real manufacturing. However, the entire approach would never get to economical energy generation. Nuclear fission is already cheaper and could be made even cleaner and safer with molten salt fission reactors. Any attempted nuclear fusion design needs to actually have the chance to get to a superior to fission in some form device. The low cost of solar power and batteries make it less reasonable to pursue bad nuclear fusion designs.
There are now over 40 funded nuclear fusion projects and companies. ITER is not a good value for science or a high likelihood path to abundant low cost energy. ITER should be stopped. ITER is not even producing good science right now. It is definitely not giving as much science as alternative lower cost projects.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
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And this is a surprise to who? I’ve said it before, there’s something fundamental about the physics of nuclear fusion we just don’t yet understand. Since the 1950’s, and 100’s of billions of dollars. And we’re no closer today then when cars had big fins, and a Coke from a vending machine cost 10cents. Yup, long after the price of Coke went up (I mean the kind with sugar, you know you drink?) and cars lost those insanely impractical add ons. Controlled fusion is still a few years away, with just a few more billions. Oh please!. We need to come up with a new methodology to “do fusion”, because whatever we’ve been doing, ain’t working!
“Nuclear fission is already cheaper and could be made even cleaner and safer with molten salt fission reactors.”
The chant of internet/reddit tech bros… still.
Yeah, the only people who think that’s true are the people who understand technology. What do they know?
We had 12 shutdowns in 3 years and seized a feed pump coming out of the last one, but go ahead and surf that armchair…. because everything would work better and be safer if we just got rid of the cladding and made the core a bucket of slop. /s
There was a time when the telephone was invented, and people suggested that it could be used to “hear” operas, the laser beam was an eccentricity for years until the use of optical fiber changed our world.
ITER is a complex method to extract energy but none knows what could be the end of all the effort, maybe a space installation…lunar perhaps?
Curious coincidence, isn’t it? The ITER and ISS projects are both products of Reagan-Gorbachev-Thatcher “relationship”, the result of which was de facto surrender of USSR. While the masses were celebrating, the decision makers had to fix the loose ends. One of the loose ends was Soviet space program with a clear goal of going to Mars in style (space stations + nuclear propulsion, both at very high technology readiness level by 90s), and a long line of successful planetary expeditions to Venus. All the people who made those things had to be “managed” so that they don’t end up recruited by undesirable entities. Another part of cleaning up was Soviet nuclear power program, which included Tokamak reactors (ITER is that type), nuclear space propulsion (including plasma core fission reactor-motor) that delivered an operational nuclear thermal rocket motor, and more commercial things like a massive enrichment facilities. And there it was: let us do ITER, the symbol of cooperation and blah-blah-blah, while Soviet projects were abandoned. ITER sucked up all fusion funding for decades, all scientists, and delivered nothing. ISS coincided with scuttling of Soviet MIR station, and ISS was a sort of “make work” project for the remaining Soviet space industry, which did the same as ITER did for plasma physics: delivered nothing, sucked up all funding and scientists. Space fission reactors (“Topaz”) were bought, studied and forgotten. Mars program was abandoned and forgotten (until Musk showed up). There were other things that were abandoned and forgotten, not only in USSR, but also in Europe and Japan, in the same narrow time window. End result: no fusion, no Gen4 fission outside Russia (liquid sodium) and China (high-temperature gas), no Mars expeditions (SpaceX is not yet there, and there is a reason to worry about that), not even Luna, and recreation of some achievements from 40+ years ago (soil sample, rover, etc) is celebrated as new and great success. Compared to what, one may ask. It is a very consistent substitution of the future as it was supposed to be, with the present as it should not have happened. If it was an intentional effort of derailing the entire technological progress by diverting all that effort into nonsensical activities, it was indeed a great success. Apple is a three+ trillion-dollar company, woo-hoo.
That’s a very interesting take, albeit I’d consider it as a conspiracy theory because of one thing: it assumes too much competency on the part of the planners.
I don’t think they are. Also it’s a known fact that, if unchecked, public organizations end up dedicating more resources to their self preservation than to the goal that presumably justified their creation, and will go on on that path until being forced by either external observers or events.
Politicians just love to pay lip service to science and technology progress, while they really want to get voters support. And that’s why they end up building bureaucratic boondoggles that deliver nothing.
It is history now. Opinions do not matter for history, especially so recent and well documented. The whole planet made the wrong turn, and it is also a fact that neither you, me or that guy made decisions for it to be made. It does not take much intelligence to divert funding into “make work” projects, and some very smart people make a living (careers really) by advising decision makers on how to achieve their objectives, whatever they might be. They take the money for consulting work and deliver a workable plan of action – it is business, not personal. Planners are “planners” only when they got that plan put into their hands, and they outsource such work not only because intelligence is required for that, but also for deniability. Such consulting is a fairly large industry (KPMG and such), but don’t ask me how I know that.
Back to ITER, its history reads like a litany of inexcusable executive crimes. Put an old Japanese academic to “manage” an international R&D program with multi-decade plan, multi-billion budget, absurdly complex governance, unbelievable schedule, endless subcontracting and ridiculous logistics. Spend five years or so of paid time just arguing on the location of the build, because Japan was also “an option” despite its seismicity and other unsolvable issues. Throw money at problems not caused (or solvable) by shortage of money. Change executives in despair, and move schedule another 10 years because “it was not my fault” and the new guy resets the “sin counter”. It was set up for failure – the historical evidence is irrefutable; but not the failure of wasting almost all fusion budget in the world, almost all subject experts (a whole generation of them, or two by now) including the old school that died out in the process, and decades of wasted time. Even if somehow miraculously it worked out as planned, it would be still a D-T reaction with zero commercial energy production prospects. Legalising that slow-blow neutron bomb complete with a large tritium plant would be a non-starter compared to any half-decent Gen3 fission plant even today, which still takes a ridiculous number of years and billions.
“…loose ends was Soviet space program… All the people who made those things had to be “managed” so that they don’t end up recruited by undesirable entities….Soviet nuclear power program…operational nuclear thermal rocket motor…massive enrichment facilities….scuttling…the remaining Soviet space industry, which did the same as ITER did for plasma physics, Space fission reactors …”
If that was “the plan” then I withdraw my objections as it worked, And I would not be surprised if it were not true. The Post Soviet economy had no money for any of these and if all these scientists had not been otherwise occupied then, could have been a big problem. And I do believe that the US and British governments were capable of such planning, then, but they are different now, and are not run by the same people presently.
Yes, one of the explicit goals of getting the Russians involved with ISS was to keep their rocket engineers employed and not working for Iran, North Korea, etc.
Yeah, it was put in a highly inconvenient orbit for the rest of the world, just so that it would be easily reached from the USSR’s spaceport.
This is right as far as the ISS goes, it’s also the reason we were deliberately dependent on Soyuz for manned access for so long. But I don’t think the case for ITER is so clear cut.
All government projects/agencies eventually become nothing more than job programs. ITER is no different.
1) Start with a lofty goal
2) Employ people
3) New goal: keep people employed
Yeah, it’s a complete waste of time and money now. Helion and ZAP energy will be break even soon, and Helion likely selling power to grid within 5 years.
AI led revolution in industrial automation is going to make development and manufacturing of newer tech fusion reactors an order of magnitude cheaper within 10 years. Replacing $100/hour elite technicians with 100x $1/hour robots.
At which point reduction in hardware costs make stellarators, heavy ion fusion and other approaches much more attractive.
Tritium and first wall issues are a dire problem. The solution is to go much bigger so that pure D-D fuelling becomes viable, but that means 10’s of GW per installation.
Going bigger has always been the solution to making fusion work; Go big enough, after all, and you don’t need any mechanism at all, it lights off on its own and burns for billions of years.
The real problem with fusion is that it’s just not going to be economically competitive with fission. It requires cryogenic superconductors, ultra high purity plasma, barring use of REALLY hard to light off reactions it produces as many neutrons as fission, only higher energy… It’s technically difficult to pull off at any human scale.
While getting fission to work is Victorian era engineering. Literally, if the Victorians had known the relevant physics, they could have built working fission reactors. Fission is EASY. You’ve literally had uranium ore deposits start functioning as fission reactors, in nature!
The only thing keeping fission reactors from being economically competitive is an utterly insane level of regulation, crafted by people who see their job as winding the industry down, not just making sure it’s reasonably safe. It was actually economically very competitive back when the level of regulation was sane.
Now, that’s the situation on Earth, and possibly Mars, because both planets have hydrothermally concentrated ore bodies of fissile elements. You need that because the elemental abundance of fission fuels is very low. Once you get to areas of the solar system where that sort of thing isn’t available, fusion certainly has a huge advantage in terms of fuel availability.
But, on Earth? Fission will always be cheaper, because it’s just easier to do.
Patheric, what a useless project, waste of money and resources, by 2039 (the first experiments) we will be well into post ASI/Singularity era and this tech will be ‘stone age’ level and irrelevant, even before we will start using it.
“Patheric, what a useless project, waste of money and resources…”
This is not a deficit, it’s a feature. I believe the “powers that be” love this thing because it will never work or be too costly to run. The last thing they want is cheap localized power for the masses. For the $2.2 billion, it will be more, invested in this thing we could have 220 small $10 million dollar experiments that one would likely work at far less cost.
And even if they build this monstrosity, I saw a smaller model where the plasma got out of control. It slashed a huge gash in the container. Something this much bigger could destroy the whole thing if the plasma did the same as the smaller one.
Common sense would tell you that to make fusion work, it will be far easier to design some sort of peak, pulsed system. The forces are so high steady state that while they may be able to pull it off, it will likely not be economical.
You could do a hell of a lot with small $10 million dollar pulsed projects.
Could actually have built fusion plants back in the 50’s, if we’d needed to. I’ve seen the engineering study for one: It was a huge underground enclosure in rock, molten salt shower, and you lowered bombs to the center and blew them up. The shower dissipated the shock wave before it hit the wall and all you had was really hot molten salt you could use to power a conventional steam cycle.
You only had to detonate a bomb a couple of times a day to keep everything hot.
One problem was that the smallest feasible size for this approach would power the whole East coast, and it still wouldn’t be cheaper than a regular fission reactor. The other is that calling the bombs “fuel pellets” didn’t make politicians less antsy.
But technically feasible with 1950’s technology? Sure. We could start building one next week if we NEEDED fusion. But we don’t need fusion.
Modern fusion research exists for a lot of reasons, but the need for a new source of energy isn’t one of them. Providing test data to bomb designers, maintaining the pretense by some Greens that they aren’t opposed to all high tech sources of power, pork barreling. And, yeah, the small outfits that just want to produce power.
But ITER stopped being about anything but graft a long time ago.
This is becoming what space programs had been until recently.
An eternal pantomime of pursuing the big goal, when the goal really is keeping a bunch of people perpetually employed.
Not gonna work, ever. Current science lacks the understanding of the underlying phenomenon, which makes what they are building a big flush of time and money.
The world needs to embrace modern, safe nuclear power plants until an alternative way to produce power can see the light of day.
Fission is a temperature pressure relationship , in space it occurs at the core of planetary bodies where pressure produce dense matter and maintain it at critcal mass. Science is trying to replicate what is seen on a stars surface which is merely a byproduct of the exothermic activity occuring in the core. It’s like the hood of a parked car glowing red-hot because there’s a fire in the engine compartment and a paint manufacturer spending trillions to develop paint that glows red hot while ignoring the heat source below the surface.
Good news is that Helion will be building COmmercial fusion generators before 5 years.
I do not agree, it provider work for a lot of people and will provide insights for a lot of people/companies, better to spend this on science than warfare, its still a minor percentage to bullets being produced each year. The concept itself gave fruit to all of these startups youve mentioned, keep that in mind! There will be offsping. Same could be said about whatever spaceprogram weve had last decades.
Broken window fallacy.
At what point does it make more economic sense to build a massive bulk mass of metal or other appropriate material in the earth under Nevada or the Western China Desert or Siberia where an actual H-Bomb can be detonated repeatedly and the heat used to run electrical turbines? Maybe big and dumb and brute force can succeed where big and complex and never functional fails over and over, no? I think Isaac Arthur touched on this as the only proven Fusion Power at the present time. Thoughts?
WHY?
The main selling points for Fusion energy was carbon free, endless ubiquitous fuel supply (basically water), cheap energy.
Solar/wind with battery storage gives that NOW, and every year is getting cheaper and more efficient.
I am all for scientific research, but multi-generational projects, that AT BEST, deliver nothing that we do not already have; are a waste of money, research talent, and time.
The problem with solar, and even more so with wind, is a combination of not being dispatchable, (The energy shows up when IT wants to, not when you want it.) and a relatively low EROEI (Energy return on energy invested).
Because of the dispachability deficit, solar and wind require storage that conventional and nuclear don’t, and are with any realistic amount of storage subject to occasional brownouts when you get a long run of bad weather.
Low EROEI means that you need to invest more work and more resources in the energy producing part of the economy, leaving less for the “doing stuff you actually want to do” part of the economy. The worse the EROEI gets, the larger the fraction of the economy is just devoted to getting energy, and the less of it to doing things that actually contribute to standard of living.
Agriculture and horse power had a low EROEI, and the result was that until we started using fossil fuels, up to 97% of the economy was directly or indirectly devoted to agriculture. It’s not any accident that western societies began increasing in wealth right about the time fossil fuels were adopted: Low EROEI guarantees widespread poverty.
Right now, ‘renewable’ energy sources have a small market penetration, are able to be implemented using energy from other, more effective sources, so this dismal cycle hasn’t really kicked in yet. But the larger the fraction of our energy comes from low EROEI sources, the poorer we will be come, inevitably.
This doesn’t bother some people, either because they ideologically favor widespread poverty, or expect to be among the small minority of elites. But it ought to matter to anybody who actually cares about human welfare.
At the rate ITER is going, the fusion start-ups will be done with D-T, D-D, D-He, & H-B11 fusion and will be working on the CNO-based proton-proton fusion. This is just absolutely abysmal and has done more to slow down the progress of fusion research than help it.