Fusion megaproject (ITER) confirms 5-year delay, trims costs

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/fusion-megaproject-confirms-5-year-delay-trims-costs

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Fusion megaproject confirms 5-year delay, trims costs[/font]

By Daniel CleryJun. 16, 2016 , 4:00 PM

[font size=3]The ITER fusion reactor will fire up for the first time in December 2025, the €18-billion project’s governing council confirmed today. The date for “first plasma” is 5 years later than under the old schedule, and to get there the council is asking the project partners—China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States—to cough up an extra €4 billion ($4.5 billion).

“It is expected, if there are no objections, that we can approve [the schedule] by November and then we can move forward,” says ITER director general Bernard Bigot.

ITER aims to show that it is feasible to fuse hydrogen nuclei together to form helium and thereby release enough excess energy to make a viable source of power. To achieve that requires heating two hydrogen isotopes—deuterium (D) and tritium (T)—to temperatures above 100 million degrees Celsius. ITER will feature an enormous vessel to contain the D-T plasma, powerful superconducting magnets to confine it, and elaborate particle accelerators and microwave generators to heat it.

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The council meeting yesterday and today rubberstamped the 2025 target and accepted a price tag of slightly under €4 billion, down by €600 million. Managers shaved off some of the cost of reaching first plasma by delaying the construction of some components—ones that aren’t needed for early experiments—until later dates. ITER staff is now working on a staged approach in which a few years of experiments are followed by upgrades, then more experiments and more upgrades, and so on. Early studies will use only hydrogen or deuterium for simplicity, leaving the radioactive tritium for later.

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[NNadir]

1. PPPL's Andrew Zwicker was on a panel last night at the Princeton Section ACS meeting.

I like the guy, a plasma physicist, personally; and I actually voted for him in the primary when he ran for Congress to replace the retiring Congressman Rush Holt, even though I saw him as a Holt wannabee. As I've been around him more though, I like him as a thoughtful, positive guy who really cares about science education and general liberal political principles. I had a nice chat with him when he set a booth to promote his Congressional campaign at a local town fair kind of event.

He came in 4th in that Primary - but so did Holt, also a plasma physicist, (for whom I voted) in his first Congressional Primary. Holt was ultimately elected, and proved to be the best Congressman I ever had.

Zwicker was narrowly elected to the NJ Assembly, the first Democrat to represent that district in about half a century. He kept his day job, which is as the head of educational outreach for the plasma physics lab. One of the great resources in this community is the "Ron E. Hatcher Science on Saturday" program which Zwicker administers and now (after Ron Hatcher's untimely death) hosts. On Saturdays in the dead of winter, it brings prominent scientists from Princeton University, PPPL itself, and other major universities on the East Coast and beyond to give hour long lectures on subjects from (of course) fusion energy, to epigenetics, to scientific heuristics, to oceanography, to the chemistry of conducting polymers to high level computational materials science...

It's pretty funny, because whenever fission energy is discussed, it's the usual crap that could come out the airheads at Greenpeace, nuclear war, proliferation, meltdowns, radioactive waste...blah...blah...blah...with no recognition that nuclear fission is the last best readily available hope of the rapidly cooking human race.

Of course the punch line is to sell fusion which allegedly has none of these problems. They point out that with fusion, the upper 10 cm of Lake Erie could provide all humanity's energy forever...blah...blah...blah. Could. Isn't, but could. It sounds rather like people hawking the only slightly less useless solar and wind industries. Last night Zwicker was uncharacteristically honest though, pointing out that the only real problem with fusion is that it doesn't work. The old joke is still true: For half a century fusion power has continuously been 30 years off in the future.

The fact is, and many of the scientists at PPPL will confess it if you press them, that even if they were able to sustain a fusion reaction, they have a huge materials science problem. Nobody has ever dealt before with a continuous flux of 14.3 MeV neutrons, devices even to test materials with neutrons at this level simply don't exist. They are an order of magnitude more energetic than fission neutrons. It's quite possible that if the ITER is ever fired up, it won't last very long.

(In their defense, there's been some wonderful physical (generally computational) chemistry of tungsten alloys written on behalf of the fission enterprise; some of which could actually prove useful since tungsten has the interesting property of being pretty much insoluble in liquid plutonium.)

Zwicker made the point last night that science should not be justified by appeals to "what it is good for..." Science enriches us even if it has no purpose, he says, and I agree, even though I'm not holding my breath for the ITER to prove something. PPPL has produced some interesting work in materials science, and of course, plasma physics which is important outside of fusion. But their funding does depend on that "Lake Erie" spiel, and Zwicker mentions it often when he speaks.

But their attitude about fission always elicits a chuckle from my sons and I, when we refer to their talks as being in full Upton Sinclair mode. That's what my son said last night, "Full Upton Sinclair Mode." Upton Sinclair, after getting his ass kicked when running for Governor of California, said, "It's very hard to get a man to understand something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it."

I suppose if they came out with the truth, that fission works and is actually superior to everything else, which it is, they might lose even more funding, and their funding is always in trouble. Their paychecks depend on demonizing fission.

It's kind of sad, because in general the Science on Saturday lectures are wonderful, but it's too bad that there's an unfortunate, and frankly toxic, subliminal method attached. The planetary atmosphere is collapsing now, and it isn't going to wait around for all that magic stuff, solar trash and energy storage trash and wind trash and, for that matter fusion. Time's up. We really have only one option to save what can be saved, and what can be saved is decreasing in size by the hour.

Have a nice weekend.