A society project named ITER
ITER: a "society project"
March 17, 2006
****August 29, 2008: tongues loosen
Yes, this is how the officials who came to present ITER expressed themselves yesterday, in the hall of Pertuis where we had been invited for a debate. I managed with great difficulty to get a microphone after we had heard tedious speeches where we were told "that everything had been planned in terms of environmental impact". I could hear, for example, during an interminable speech that it had been planned to take into account the preservation of flowers and beetles near the site of this ploutophysic complex (ploutos, in Greek, means "rich"). On computer-generated images we could see the look of the buildings, the reception structures, the road infrastructure, etc.
I wondered where science and technology were in this presentation, which was halfway between that of a luxurious real estate project and that of a Club Med village. I also wondered when the debate would begin.
In fact, ITER resembles the statements made by Villepin about his first employment contract. The law is there, and the government declares itself ready to discuss all the details that the interested parties might want to raise.
For ITER, it's much the same. It seems that there is no question of challenging decisions that have already been made "at the top", by "officials", without consulting us, the French people.
ITER is a reflection of our world today. You have billions of euros lying around? Invest them in luxury, the most expensive leisure activities. The order books of manufacturers of 120-foot yachts are full. The 1000 square meter apartments in Dubai are selling like hot cakes. Don't be stingy, don't let profitability hinder you. Useful things don't sell well, it's the useless that is in fashion. Let me tell you something. I believe that the small group of happy few who will benefit from ITER during their careers don't care at all whether the machine is or is not profitable; operational.
Do you care about the yield per hectare of a golf course?
Will ITER work? There, the officials become less talkative: the Blablatron immediately stalls. I reminded them that people have been chasing controlled fusion for sixty years, since immediately after the war, with little success. I reminded them that this had little precedent in terms of technology. People invented airplanes that quickly flew higher and faster. Cars started to run. Nuclear power was just beginning in 1938. A few years after the first nuclear reactor, built by Enrico Fermi under the stands of a university stadium in Chicago, it diverged. There were bombs and then, in the same breath, civil reactors. Rockets were perfected, people were sent to the Moon. All of this in a relatively short number of years. Meanwhile, controlled fusion resembles an endless fairy tale, a mirage that keeps moving away. Every time a step is taken, a new problem arises. But after six decades, no one questions the relevance of the approach, entirely based on the invention of the Russian Artsimovitch: the Tokamak.
- It's simply a question of scale...
In short, if in another twenty years (the time frame given to evaluate ITER) it doesn't work, if the machine chokes after just a few seconds, never mind, it's simply that this one wasn't big enough. Another one will be built, even bigger, even more expensive.
- Pay and shut up.
I reminded them that I had been present in Cadarache twenty-five years ago when the Center's officials presented the main lines of the "Tore Supra" project. They spoke of a "Sun in the laboratory". The Blablatron was already in full swing. A quarter of a century later, there was still no fusion. But "the superconducting magnet works." I find it a bit long to develop a simple superconducting magnet in twenty-five years, especially since this technology is not revolutionary. It is already used in the bubble chambers of particle accelerators.
One of the "animators" (the word G.O. comes to my lips) told me two things. He first criticized my unattractive face and suggested I show it to the audience, which I did immediately by standing up. I added that it was simply the face of a French taxpayer confronted with such a project. His second comment came when I expressed my surprise at this qualification of "society project" for a machine that seemed to me to be destined to produce electricity in principle.
- But, sir, ITER is much more than a research project....
There was clearly something I had not caught.
They asked me "what my question was, so that an answer could be given to me". I then asked "how the project people intended to manage the rapid radiative cooling resulting from the braking radiation caused by the pollution of the plasma by highly charged nuclei, torn from the vessel".
The G.O. immediately retreated, waving his hands in a gesture of denial. I then turned to the other table, where various personalities sat, including a woman who seemed to have some responsibilities in this matter and who kept an imperturbable smile, the result of long experience in research policy. But the ball did not come back. The specialist on flowers and beetles remained silent as well.
Things were not going as planned. What was this plasma physicist doing in the middle of this village crowd? Moreover, as I was reminded, hadn't we already sufficiently debated all of this at previous meetings in Nice, Avignon, and Aix?
Finally, they pointed out to me a man sitting in the front row like me, a certain Michel Chatelier, stationed at Cadarache. In response to the sentence I had spoken, which he was the only one to understand, he simply said "that it was a good question".
In fact, it is the most annoying question, one not to ask.
"Fusion worked in England for three seconds, but that was because the magnet was made of copper. It wasn't designed to work longer." But then, how come we, the French, who had a magnetization system capable of operating continuously (superconductive), couldn't manage to get the same fusion reactions?
Even if the English had had superconducting windings, would the exo-energetic fusion reactions have been sustained? I'm not convinced. The collisional fusion plasma contains fast atoms that manage to cross the magnetic confinement barrier and tear atoms from the vessel. These pollute the plasma and are the source of intense radiative cooling. I predict that the furnace will choke, that fusion will stop, after seconds, tens of seconds, maybe minutes. Nothing has been planned to deal with this problem, which you will not find mentioned at all in the luxurious brochures published by the CEA...