ITER: a "Society Project"
March 17, 2006
August 29, 2008: tongues are loosening
Yes, that’s exactly how the officials presenting ITER spoke yesterday, in the banquet hall of Pertuis, where we had been invited for a debate. I barely managed to grab a microphone after listening to laborious speeches in which we were told "everything had been accounted for regarding environmental impact." For example, during an endless speech, I heard that provisions had been made to preserve flowers and beetles near the site of this plutophysics complex (ploutos, in Greek, means "valuable"). On computer-generated images, we could see the appearance of the buildings, accommodation structures, road infrastructure, etc.
I wondered where science and technology were in this presentation, which seemed halfway between a luxury real estate project and the setup of a Club Méditerranée village. I also wondered when the real debate would begin.
In fact, ITER resembles Villepin’s statements about his first employment contract. The law is there, and the government declares itself ready to discuss every detail that interested parties might wish to raise.
For ITER, it’s much the same. It seems there’s no question of challenging decisions already made "at the top," by "officials," without consulting us, the French.
ITER reflects our world today. You have billions of euros lying around? Invest them in luxury, in the most expensive leisure activities. The order books of 120-foot yacht builders are full. 1,000-square-meter apartments in Dubai sell like hotcakes. Don’t be petty, don’t let profitability hold you back. Useful things don’t sell well—only useless things are fashionable. Let me tell you something: I believe the exclusive club of a few lucky individuals who will benefit from ITER during their careers couldn’t care less whether the machine is profitable or even operational.
Are we concerned about the hectare yield of a golf course?
Will ITER work? At this point, the officials become noticeably quieter: the Blablatron immediately shuts down. I reminded them that humans have been chasing controlled fusion for sixty years, since immediately after the war, with little success. I reminded them that there is little precedent for this kind of technology. Humans invented airplanes, which soon began flying higher and faster. Cars started rolling. Nuclear energy was still in its infancy in 1938. Not long after the first nuclear reactor—built by Enrico Fermi beneath the stands of a university stadium in Chicago—began operating. Then came the bombs, and shortly after, civilian reactors. We perfected rockets and sent people to the Moon. All this in a relatively short span of years. Meanwhile, controlled fusion resembles an endless fairy tale, a mirage that keeps receding. Every time we take a step forward, a new problem arises. Yet after six decades, no one questions the relevance of the approach, entirely based on the Russian scientist Artsimovitch’s invention: the Tokamak.
- It’s just a matter of scale...
Briefly, if in twenty more years (that’s the timeline proposed to assess ITER) it still doesn’t work, if the machine chokes after just a few tens of seconds, well, so be it—this one just wasn’t big enough. We’ll simply start building another, even larger, even more expensive.
- Pay up and shut up.
I recalled that I had been present at Cadarache twenty-five years ago, when officials from the center presented the broad outlines of the "Tore Supra" project. They spoke of a "Sun in the laboratory." The Blablatron was already running at full speed. A quarter of a century later, no fusion. But "the superconducting magnet works." I find it rather long—twenty-five years—to develop a simple superconducting magnet, especially since this technology isn’t revolutionary. It’s already used in bubble chambers of particle accelerators.
One of the "animators" (the word G.O. comes to mind) said two things to me. First, he criticized my unattractive face and suggested I show it to the audience, which I immediately did by standing up. I added that it was simply the face of a French taxpayer confronted with such a project. His second remark came when I expressed surprise at the term "society project" being applied to a machine that seemed, at first glance, destined solely to produce electricity.
- But sir, ITER is much more than a research project...
At that moment, it was clear to me that I had missed something.
I was asked, "What was your question, so that an answer could be provided?" I then asked, "How do the project’s people plan to manage the rapid radiative cooling resulting from bremsstrahlung radiation caused by the pollution of the plasma by highly charged nuclei torn from the containment vessel?"
The G.O. instantly retreated, waving his hands in denial. I turned then to the other table, where various personalities sat, including a woman who seemed to have some responsibility in this matter and maintained an imperturbable smile, the result of long experience in research policy. But the ball didn’t come back. Not even silence from the expert on flowers and beetles.
Things weren’t going as planned. What was a plasma physicist doing among this village crowd? Besides, as I was reminded, hadn’t we already debated all this enough during previous meetings in Nice, Avignon, and Aix?
Eventually, I was directed to a man sitting in the front row like me, a certain Michel Chatelier, stationed at Cadarache. In response to the sentence I had spoken—of which he was the only one to grasp the meaning—he simply said, "That’s a good question."
In fact, it’s the annoyingly excellent question that should never be asked.
"Fusion worked in England for three seconds, but that was because the magnet was made of copper. It wasn’t designed to last longer." But then how is it that we, the French, who had a magnetization system capable of continuous operation (superconducting), failed to achieve the same fusion reactions?
Even if the English had used superconducting windings, would the exo-energetic fusion reactions have been sustained? I’m not convinced. The collisional fusion plasma contains fast-moving atoms that manage to breach the magnetic confinement barrier and tear atoms from the vessel walls. These atoms pollute the plasma and are the source of intense radiative cooling. I predict the reactor will choke, fusion will stop, within seconds, tens of seconds, perhaps even minutes...