Some countries have formally committed to eliminating power from nuclear fission. Most have not. Most countries have at least some regions that would be happy to accept the good, stable employment and tax base offered by a nuclear power plant in exchange for the very slight risk of accidents. So why aren't more fission power plants getting built in countries where they are <i>not</i> formally excluded? I believe the single greatest factor is that they take too long to build and require too large a lump of money, because a single modern reactor is too big.<p>Modern Generation III/III+ reactor designs have actually made this "chunkiness" worse; there's no modern reactor design under 500 MWe that's certified in the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, or the EU. Designs in that lower power range were built decades ago, and a few still run, but now it's big-or-nothing. AP1000 and EPR are 1117 and 1600 MWe, respectively, and all projects using them are behind schedule/over budget. And since these large projects are leading to such poor outcomes for involved companies, it will be difficult to get follow-on orders that will benefit from the hard earned lessons of their initial builds.<p>Even if all the technical problems are solved and fusion proves capable of producing net electricity, fusion power risks hitting this same too-big-to-build problem afflicting fission if it can't scale down. If the only approaches that work are enormous tokamaks with an entry level price of $10-billion-or-more, then they'll be engineering marvels that hardly anyone builds. Maybe they'll someday supply 10% of China's electricity.
The article mentions one big issue: plasma containment. It doesn't even mention what I think of as being the biggest hurdle to commercial fusion power generation: neutron containment.<p>Fusion hydrogen requires heavy isotopes, namely tritium, to generate sufficient reactions. This generates s lot of free neutrons however, enough that they will tend to destroy what container they're in. This is a significant, possibly commercially insurmountable, engineering problem.<p>Helium-3 is one alternative but is super rare on Earth ( even the heavier Helium-4 escapes the Earth's gravity once it reaches the atmosphere (so party balloons are consuming an irreplaceable resource thanks to an effective subsidy from Congress who narrowmindedly decided to offload the Strategic Helium Reserve at submarket rates).<p>People like to bandy about phrases like "free energy" when it comes to fusion. Well, free fuel and free energy aren't the same thing. A plant has a capex and running costs, a finite lifetime and a power output. Put those numbers together and you have a base energy cost even with free and essentially limitless fuel.<p>The article talks about producing tritium from lithium. Great. The demand for batteries is already going to stretch the worlds lithium supply so that's another advance we need.
correction.. ITER & derivative based fusion is delayed NOT fusion itself.<p>Honestly I feel ITER is such a big boondoggle that its cannibalizing pretty much all other fragments of research in fusion. for reference even based on tokamak design MIT ARC is uses much higher T REBCO superconductor based magnets that ITER cannot even adopt. which do you think has a better chance of success? besides that there are multiple other efforts like German stellarator, FRC based design by trialpha and even the opensource focus fusion. IMO its much better to spread the resources into these efforts rather than dumping a bunch of money into monstrosity like ITER and going back into the lap of fossils for next 2 decades.<p>thinking about [lack of] fusion funding really pisses me off.<p>/end-rant
So the people pushing fusion say it won't even start producing commercial electricity until after 2050? But by then we will be all on renewables plus cheap storage, or at least pretty close. What would the incentive be for ripping that all out and replacing it with immensely costly fusion plants?
Considering the advances of renewables, both solar and in/off-shore wind, do we really need fusion?<p>Most of the issues with current fission are political ("spent" fuel <i>can</i> be reprocessed) and economic (these beasts are insanely expensive to build and operate safely) and we haven't even touched MSR's and Thorium. I get fusion would be beautiful, but it has its problems too (heavy neutron bombardment will eventually turn the reactor into a pile of hot nuclear waste - or, at best, MSR fuel) and we may need to face the simple fact our technology isn't up to <i>that</i> challenge just yet.<p>Although stellarators may offer some shortcuts.<p>Maybe we'll need fusion for multi-generation starships supposed to operate for many centuries on a closed loop system, but that need seems a bit too far into the future for us to concern ourselves too much with it. Solar should be fine up to Mars and compact fission should be enough up to the Oort cloud.
Shees... I really wish they would cancel it already. All technical and scientific concerns aside, the patient is already dead of cost sickness, and is only kept alive by pumping money into its scabrous leaking veins.<p>If they took even 1/10th of the money and spread it around some of the more promising, smaller, non-tokamak, scrappier fusion projects like tri-alpha, polywell, or the Lockheed skunkworks one that actually have a plausible path to power generation I think that the money would make a better impact.
Even next gen fission would be a better investment. India and China are doing very nice things with thorium these days...
Too bad they'll never turn off the pork faucet until forced.
2 relevant podcast episodes from the great science and engineering podcast omega tau. Podcasts/interviews with people close to the work.
<a href="http://omegataupodcast.net/22-nuclear-fusion-at-mpi-fur-plasmaphysik/" rel="nofollow">http://omegataupodcast.net/22-nuclear-fusion-at-mpi-fur-plas...</a>
<a href="http://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-iter/" rel="nofollow">http://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-iter/</a>
2050? Maybe they can run their systems on GNU Hurd then.<p>(</sarcasm> I've been hearing how fusion reactors are "just around the corner" since I was a teenager, at least 40 years now.)
"It is an international project with seven partners: China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States."<p>Found the problem.
There are already some more or less successful fusion reactors out there like Wendelstein [1] with a way smaller budget (~€1B) and that are already completed. Why does ITER need such a huge budget, long time to completion and the involvement of 7 countries/organizations to essentially proof the point of fusion energy?
As far as I understood ITER is not meant to be commercially viable.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X</a><p>EDIT: originally I wrote 195 countries, which is BS of course :)