As a child, I read <i>Friday</i> by Robert A Heinlein, which portrayed a future in which energy needs are addressed by energy storage devices called "Shipstones", which are described as <i>a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker."</i><p>In the novel, the Shipstone's eponymous inventor realised <i>"that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.</i><p><i>"Those who spoke of "energy scarcity" and of "conserving energy" simply did not understand the situation. The sky was "raining soup"; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it."</i><p>Ever since then, I've been far more interested in new methods of <i>storing</i> and <i>transporting</i> energy than in new methods of <i>generating</i> energy.<p>Also, what happens if the mechanisms that contain the "Star in a Bottle" fail? Will the French Alps suddenly and catastrophically acquire a new valley?
My father worked on the ITER project for many years. This article goes some way to express the shear scale of this project, it's absolutely vast.<p>When I was a lot younger I was taken on a tour of JET (<a href="http://www.efda.org/jet/" rel="nofollow">http://www.efda.org/jet/</a>) and was overawed with the size of it. ITER is an order of magnitude bigger.<p>The machine that follows ITER is where things get really interesting. Called DEMO, it's still in the planning phase - but will provide a template for future commercial fusion power generation. They're talking about possibly putting fusion generated power into the grid by 2040. Truly exciting stuff.
It's crazy that the US blew over 4 Trillion and countless lives for oil in Iraq. Yet, we spend practically nothing on technology that could offer clean, safe, energy independence.<p>I'm happy to see any money going into fusion research, but it does seem that Focus Fusion has a much better chance of delivering in the near term. If you're unfamiliar with the technology, check out the Google tech talk below.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg</a>
> will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons—more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower.<p>This is a strange sentence.<p><pre><code> (1) Notice Height of object-A;
(2) Notice Weight of object-A;
(3) Compare Weight of object-A to Weight of object-B
where object-B is known more for its property of
Height than of its Weight.
</code></pre>
The sense here (I think) is that the Eiffel tower is significantly taller than than ITER, and therefore ought to be significantly heavier. But it's not! ITER is heavier, and heavier by a lot. Go figure!<p>But what a silly line of reasoning. Is it a common conclusion that taller things should also be heavier things?<p>Further, this seems to me to be of the same breed as "bigger than the state of Rhode Island"-type of arbitrary comparisons -- only in this instance more confusing!
Check this out, Japan is going their own way instead of this experiment<p><i>According to researchers at a demonstration reactor in Japan, a fusion generator should be feasible in the 2030s and no later than the 2050s. Japan is pursuing its own research program with several operational facilities that are exploring several fusion paths.</i><p><a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/0029-5515/45/2/004" rel="nofollow">http://iopscience.iop.org/0029-5515/45/2/004</a><p>Also, they are already planning the successor to ITER, a commercial plant called DEMO<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO</a>
<i>No one knows iter’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes iter the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth.</i><p>And WhatsApp cost how much?
I wonder if a more open design approach would help them to build trust, increase quality and reduce expense. Rather than the team doing all the work themselves they could open up more data to outsiders to look at and spend more of their time on management. See italic points below. The more of the article I read, the more it sounds like by sharing information openly they could save massively.<p>" As the meeting ended, he noted that there was not enough time to vet the components that occupy the third floor: plans had to be gathered, specifications brought up to date, problems reconciled. “It is not reasonable,” he said. “It means that we would need to <i>process thousands of data points in three weeks</i>.” Chiocchio asked if things would speed up after early floors were finished, but there were simply too many details to work through before delivering drawings to the contractor. “We have no more float,” Cordier said. “If we delay now, we will have a real delay. The only way to avoid a schedule loss is to increase our resources to cope with it.”<p>That afternoon, Chiocchio joined me for lunch. He seemed exhausted. iter, by the time it is finished, <i>will contain ten million individual parts, but he had only twenty-eight people working for him</i>. He later showed me a room near his office where three men sit at workstations every day to hunt down conflicts. Before each man, there was the huge iter puzzle in miniature, filling up two computer screens. Up close, the design looked as though someone had taken the industrial landscape that runs alongside the New Jersey Turnpike and compressed it into a cube the volume of a Holiday Inn. “We have to check everything, from clashes to interfaces—like here,” one of the men said, pointing to a schematic where a support structure for the tokamak was not lining up with an embedment plate."
Obviously the tech is really awesome, but I was curious how the projected power level compares (500 megawatts)<p>Comparison to existing powerplants: <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500+megawatts" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500+megawatts</a><p>TL;DR: We already have significantly bigger plants. ('average' coal and nuclear plant produces about twice as much power)
I hate for my only comment on this fascinating piece to be largely irrelevant, but has anyone else noticed that the publication date is March 3, 2014? It's only the 25th of February.
I read this article, and I couldn't help thinking — Couldn't they spend these billions on something like deep geothermal energy and get a much better (and more likely) return?
"Big machines either work as they’re supposed to or they don’t."<p>Anyone else struck by the wildly reductionist sentiment in that statement?
<i>a cryogenics plant, which will produce liquid helium</i><p>Wait, they are manufacturing helium? Thought that wasn't possible?<p>Or just converting gas to liquid?
Single page:<p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/03/140303fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/03/140303fa_fact_...</a>
> No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter.<p>I am not sure about this one comment in the article submitted by OP. As far as I understand the temperature at the center of the earth should be as high as that of the Sun. The core is known to be the heaviest and hottest part of our planet.
LHC didn't make me nervous and I laughed somewhat at the people who sued to keep it off for fear it might end the world.<p>This one however, I dunno. Sounds like things could go wrong with that much energy. When they made the first atomic bomb, they had theories about what might happen but not 100% sure and there were some surprises.<p>But I'll take death from this over death from fracking.