Why the ITER project must be stopped
March 23, 2006
May 13, 2010, four years later:
ITER, the nuclear fusion project, explodes its costs
http://www.univers-nature.com/inf/inf_actualite1.cgi?id=4218
ITER, the reactor based in Cadarache in southern France, promising nuclear fusion on Earth for virtually unlimited energy production (1), sees its bill literally skyrocketing, with construction costs expected to be at least twice the originally projected 4.57 billion (2).
Although China, South Korea, the United States, India, Japan, and the Russian Federation are part of the project, the European Union is the main economic contributor. In this capacity, it should see its share rise from 2.7 to 7.2 billion euros over the ten years dedicated to construction. For the European Commission, two options are being considered to cope: increase contributions from member states or raise the project's share within the EU budget.
Without even mentioning the current U.S. withdrawal from funding ITER, this cost inflation is largely due to the project's complexity and a profound evolution of its current design (from 2001) to align with today's technological capabilities.
Moreover, over the past ten years, raw material costs have continuously risen, further contributing to the overall increase in ITER's bill.
For reference, it should be recalled that ITER is not intended to produce energy commercially, but rather to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion on Earth by generating, within just six minutes, around 500 million watts (MW) of heat from only 50 MW of "injected energy."
Once this milestone is achieved, a first industrial fusion reactor, DEMO, should emerge in Japan to prove the industrial feasibility of the concept by 2050.
Given the current economic crisis, will the concerned governments be willing to reach into their pockets again? It's far from certain, and without funding matching their expectations, scientists may be forced to scale down the project.
Pascal Farcy
1- ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, aims to allow humanity to approach the Sun's energy production model during the second half of the 21st century.
2- In 2007, the total budget was broken down into 4.57 billion euros for construction (10 years), 4.8 billion euros for operation (20 years), and 0.53 billion euros for decommissioning (10 to 15 years).
My 2006 text:
When I attended a so-called "debate" held in Pertuis on March 16, the anti-nuclear activists arrived. They wore white masks and shouted slogans, facing the smiles of CEA staff, led by Patrick Legrand, who in a brochure wrote, "The debate has taken root."
"The debate has taken root."
The people were extremely surprised to discover the content of my speech. Legrand eventually said to me, with a big smile:
- Well then, calm down. We'll give you a microphone. You can ask your question, and we'll answer.
But my question was:
- How do the people behind this project plan to combat the powerful radiative cooling caused by bremsstrahlung radiation resulting from heavy nuclei being torn from the wall?
And suddenly, there was no one left. Legrand, jaw dropped, made gestures of denial. The same went for the project's administrative manager, or the environmental specialist who had come to explain that "in this societal project," protecting flowers and beetles was a top priority.
Eventually, an engineer sitting next to me stammered:
- Hmm... that's a good question...
Indeed, it's the question worth 100 euros, one that must never be asked. The fastest hydrogen atoms will always manage to breach the magnetic barrier, strike the wall, and tear atoms loose, which will immediately become fully ionized. Now, the energy loss due to bremsstrahlung radiation, which depends on the square of the electric charge, increases dramatically. The plasma will become polluted and cool down. The ITER reactor will suffocate...
At Culham, the British achieved one second of fusion. ITER may achieve ten, perhaps twenty, in 20 to 40 years. No one has seriously considered how to address this problem of reactor extinction—except by saying there's a "scaling factor." Radiative losses are relatively smaller in larger machines. Once we achieve tens of seconds of fusion, we'll say, "We need to build a super-ITER, more expensive, and this time it will work."
You don't launch a project of this scale and cost without having ready solutions to serious, unavoidable problems.
Unless ITER is merely an expensive toy or a "societal project," as I heard and read in Pertuis.
ITER is above all an example of the complete lack of imagination among our scientists, the experimental counterpart of superstrings in theoretical physics. Fusion using the tokamak solution has been stagnating for half a century. We're being asked to wait another 30 to 40 years, while our physics may have completely changed by then. As I left the room, I said:
ITER is the steam engine of the third millennium.
Tore-Supra, the French tokamak, started 25 years ago (with the same old tune: "the Sun in the lab," etc.)—has failed to deliver. Fusion: zero. Temperature increases extremely limited. But "the superconducting magnet works." What a triumph! Twenty-five years to build a superconducting magnet producing 4 teslas—a technology already perfectly mastered in particle accelerators worldwide. Yet in France, we're quick to congratulate ourselves for failures.
The audience remembered the final exchange with the specialist who said, "That's a good question."
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Do we really have the means today to afford such a "dancer"?
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Oh, it sounds like a lot of money, but as a percentage of GDP, it's actually much less...
Well then.
Before leaving the room, I explained my viewpoint. It's not against fusion, but against a fusion that is not "true fusion"—just as the steam engine is not the internal combustion engine. The comparison is apt. In ITER, they're trying to operate continuously, at too low a temperature, with a polluting reaction that will activate surrounding structures, generate new radioactive waste, while the future lies in:
clean fusion: Boron-11 and Hydrogen-1, pulsed, at a billion degrees,
or:
Lithium-7 + Hydrogen-1: 500 million degrees.
The next day, by sheer coincidence, the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico announced the results of its Z-machine (search "Z machine" on Google).
Sources:
http://www.sandia.gov/media/z290.htm
http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/news-releases/2003/nuclear-power/Zneutrons.html
Content of the Futura-Sciences article:
http://www.futura-sciences.com/news-z-machine-depasse-deux-milliards-degres_8419.php
The Z-machine produced temperatures exceeding two billion degrees—easily.