ITER’s timeline for fusion stretched out even further
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"Most delayed project in the history of projects experiences major delay"
At this point, the US military looks good at keeping to time schedules.
At this point, the US military looks good at keeping to time schedules.
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At least that means it's only 16 years away now. It's been 20 years away for all of my 47 laps around the sun previously!
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No, they gave up on dilithium a long time ago, after seeing this instructional video:
But it turns out that the beryllium was harder to get than they had originally envisioned, so the shift to tungsten.
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If only there was a handy fusion energy source nearby. One we could use the photo electric effect that some guy figured out (who was that that anyway? He should have gotten some kind of top tier science award!) Then we could just set up arrays of collectors to collect them and convert those photons directly to electricity. Its just too bad there is no such easily accessed auto-running fusion reactor at just the right distance to power such a concept. It would be even better if its run cycle was over a billion years. Oh well, in ten years we will find that we are ten years from having an Earth bound fusion reactor that can boil water!
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You mean the first D-T fusion reaction that achieves Qplasma>1? Because we've had D-T fusion that doesn't do that for years. JET has been doing it since 1997.
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ITER is planned to produce 500 MW of heat from an input of 320 MW of electricity — which results in 50 MW of heat input to the plasma, for a Q of 10. How is the paragraph you quoted incorrect?
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I'm curious what people's thoughts are on Helion Energy claiming they'll be delivering commercial fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.
Obviously that sounds really, really optimistic.
But if ITER is pushing this out to the late 2030s or even into the 2040s, and Helion does manage to get something up and running well before then, say 2030 to 2033, what does that mean for ITER? And again... I'm real skeptical of Helion's timeline, it sounds very ambitious. But it has some serious backing too.
Obviously that sounds really, really optimistic.
But if ITER is pushing this out to the late 2030s or even into the 2040s, and Helion does manage to get something up and running well before then, say 2030 to 2033, what does that mean for ITER? And again... I'm real skeptical of Helion's timeline, it sounds very ambitious. But it has some serious backing too.
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I was talking about the ITER project, not what anyone else has done. The first discussions occurred in 1986 and the first D-T fusion will be in 2039.
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Helion may end up successful, but I would absolutely bet against a positive-energy installation from them by 2028. Would be cool if I’m wrong, though.
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Plasma runs will be for 400 - 600 seconds, 600 MW for start-up 30 seconds of that. The 320 MW number is the steady state for the rest. Leaves it well positive on a total energy basis.That's not what ITER has to say about the matter
Power Supply
Electricity requirements for the ITER plant and facilities will range from 110 MW to up to 620 MW for peak periods of 30 seconds during plasma operation. Power will be provided through the 400 kV circuit that already supplies the nearby CEA Cadarache site—a one-kilometre extension now links the...www.iter.org
An electrical substation on the ITER site is the vital link between the 400kV power line and ITER's electricity needs. The substation will begin functioning in early 2017. © Les Nouveaux Médias/SNC ENGAGE
Electricity requirements for the ITER plant and facilities will range from 110 MW to up to 620 MW for peak periods of 30 seconds during plasma operation. Power will be provided through the 400 kV circuit that already supplies the nearby CEA Cadarache site—a one-kilometre extension now links the ITER plant into the network.
During Plasma operation you're getting 500MW of heat from 600MW of power. I'm gonna need a few minutes to do the math but I think that's less than 1.
I guess you suck at math, then.
And you don’t have to yell, I’m right here.
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My favorite big claims are for laser fusion. Every watt of laser power represents a totally ridiculous amount of electricity. But we got slightly more out in heat!
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This paper shows a graph on page 235 showing the power profile of a run. The 620 MW peak they talk about is the 500 MW peak during startup of a run plus the 120 MW baseline. Keep in mind a big chunk of that 120 MW is for the cooling loop. The question at hand is electrical input to the system vs heat output from fusion. Not clear why we should also be including the cost of moving that heat somewhere. But even if we did, we’d still be below the 500 MW of heat output.
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( commercially viable) "Fusion" for some seems to have this connotation about it that it should inevitably happen in the foreseeable future. It must be a combination of how it's relatively simple to explain the basics, a huge air of sustainability and unlimited energy about it, it being mentioned (and taken for granted) in thousands of scifi stories that have almost normalized it... Also the fact that it's not even in pole position, but behind matter/anti-matter annihilation as a futuristic means of energy production(at an extremely superficial level). That seems to make it slightly more feasible, just by being "easier" than something else and more advanced that we can imagine.
Comparing ITER to Webb is part of this. Webb was hugely complex and a fantastic achievement, after setbacks that might superficially seem comparable. But compared to the REAL challenges we face with Fusion, it was a walk in the park. For fusion, after all those decades, the challenges ahead seem to be as daunting as ever. It's not just a matter of perfectly executing high-level engineering at the edge of what we CAN. It's more like reaching really far, in the HOPE that it will eventually allow is to solve the many remaining dealbreakers one-by-one. And everyone who's optimistic, is kinda forced to focus on a very narrow immediate challenge, and not think too much about the hundreds of already known, and still to discover, hurdles that will have to be cleared as well.
And at the end, there's a serious chance that after (hypothetically) overcoming all the technological challenges, you end up with something that is SO expensive and mindbogglingly complex and fragile, that it can't possibly scale and compete.
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I'll bet anyone here 10k they won't.
Helion's design is based on merging FRC's (field-reversed configuration) which are then magnetically compressed. This have been a subject of some level of experimental work since the 1970s. I say "some", because basically everyone that's gotten past their first machine finds it doesn't scale as expected and funding for further machines are rejected until they can better understand the process. No one has, and so the labs have basically stopped working on it. As far as anyone can tell, it just doesn't work.
Helion adds several new twists, but none of those affect the physics. Of particular note is that Helion intends to compress the FRC very rapidly, which is known to result in magneto-RT instabilities that cause the FRC to break up. Their work never covers how they intend to address this; they do talk quite a bit about the tilt mode (which is just what it sounds like) but that is not the issue,
Moreover, the system is based on a D-He3 fuel, which is much harder to get to fuse. They address this by not attempting to reach ignition. Instead, they intend to have relatively low amounts of the fuel fuse, but very efficiently extract the energy from the resulting hotter plasma. While they have made many press releases about how this is working, they all include what appears to be significant "wiggle room" in the wording which is not confidence inspiring.
Long and short, Helion has a lot of physics and a lot of engineering left to demonstrate, and some of those things have not even been attempted yet. The fact that they have stopped publishing results in the scientific literally also smells rather bad.
And finally, He3 is not available in quantity on Earth, so they intend to build additional reactors whose only purpose is to produce this fuel. This not entirely unlikely the fast breeder concept, where one reactor produces plutonium that is then burned in conventional designs. Number of commercial breeders: zero. Why? Because nuclear is barely affordable when you build one, if you have to build a second one just to turn it on, that's just a non-starter. And even if they build it, one can put a price on the He3 it produces by amortizing the cost of the plant, and then they are only going to burn some small fraction of it?
More generally we can separate the private fusion efforts into two groups, those with reasonably explored physics and those without.
The first group includes Commonwealth Fusion in the US and Tokamak Energy in the UK. That is the entire list for this category.
The rest all have significant amounts of development left to demonstrate. This includes Helion, TAE, General Fusion, First Light... the list is several pages long. Some of them are absolutely ridiculous, like NT-Tao whose machine is literally made out of an LG microwave oven (google them, look closely at the image you will find).
Despite having little to no experimental evidence, they all continue to claim they will produce commercial demos within a couple of years. TAE has been saying three years for breakeven and five for commercial demo since they formed in 1998.
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Having been outside of fusion research for 5-6ish years now, it's really interesting to look at LinkedIn posts from my former colleagues with a different mindset. Every post touting some amazing engineering milestone, and every post celebrating the complex fundamental research that is still ongoing seems to me, now, to just be further nails in the coffin of "even if it eventually works, it's not economically viable".
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Fusion: The Energy of the FUTURE! It always has been, is now, and always will be!
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Helion plans to breed the He3 in the same reactor, as side reactions to D+He3 fusion. You can’t avoid those side reactions, anyway.
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Hit them up with this one:
A typical fusion plant, like a commercial version of ITER or ARC, is quite similar to a fission plant in overall terms. Yes, the reactor is dramatically different and there's all that cryo and lithium and so forth, but everything downstream from there is largely the same. You have a cooling loop in the core that pulls heat to a steam generator, that runs into a turbogenerator, and a third loop cools the resulting cooled steam back to water. This contrasts with a coal plant where there are only two loops because the steam is generated in the first loop. We can't do that in a fission plant, or fusion, because the neutrons cause the working fluid to become radioactive, at least enough that you need to isolate it. So at a minimum, that part of the plant is going to be basically the same.
We've been building plants of this sort for well over half a century now. We know how much they cost. Everything outside of the reactor costs about 60% of the total. In the case of Vogtle, the plant in total was about $12 a watt, so just the generator (etc) parts cost maybe 7 or 8 of that. So at an absolute minimum, even if the reactor costs zero dollars, we're still looking at around 7 to 8 bucks a watt (all in, including financing).
Ok, the problem. PV is currently being installed in the US with a 35% fleet CF for an average price of 95 cents. That's all the way from the field to the grid. PV with hybrid storage for 4-hours firm is currently under $4 and falling rapidly.
So... how do they propose their reactor design will cost negative three to four dollars per watt?
Economic breakeven was crossed about 10 years ago. Fusion is not going to be economically competitive. Ever. We know this already.
I wrote this 12 years ago, and every single word still applies:
Why fusion will never happen
I like fusion, really. I’ve talked to some of luminaries that work in the field, they’re great people. I love the technology and the physics behind it. But fusion as a power source is n…
matter2energy.wordpress.com
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It must be wild to manage a project of this scale and just push things to the right by nine years in one go. A single click of the mouse, and everybody's got completely different clothes and hairstyles when a milestone is reached.
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Which is why Helion is so interesting. It only needs a relatively small cooling loop, since it harvests most of the fusion energy by magnetic induction as the plasma expands after each pulse. And it doesn’t need any of the lithium -> tritium breeding. Also, a fraction of the neutron flux of a D-T reactor. The problem is, all that is just hopes-and-dreams if they can’t get the physics to scale.Hit them up with this one:
A typical fusion plant, like a commercial version of ITER or ARC, is quite similar to a fission plant in overall terms. Yes, the reactor is dramatically different and there's all that cryo and lithium and so forth, but everything downstream from there is largely the same. You have a cooling loop in the core that pulls heat to a steam generator, that runs into a turbogenerator, and a third loop cools the resulting cooled steam back to water. This contrasts with a coal plant where there are only two loops because the steam is generated in the first loop. We can't do that in a fission plant, or fusion, because the neutrons cause the working fluid to become radioactive, at least enough that you need to isolate it. So at a minimum, that part of the plant is going to be basically the same.
We've been building plants of this sort for well over half a century now. We know how much they cost. Everything outside of the reactor costs about 60% of the total. In the case of Vogtle, the plant in total was about $12 a watt, so just the generator (etc) parts cost maybe 7 or 8 of that. So at an absolute minimum, even if the reactor costs zero dollars, we're still looking at around 7 to 8 bucks a watt (all in, including financing).
Ok, the problem. PV is currently being installed in the US with a 35% fleet CF for an average price of 95 cents. That's all the way from the field to the grid. PV with hybrid storage for 4-hours firm is currently under $4 and falling rapidly.
So... how do they propose their reactor design will cost negative three to four dollars per watt?
Economic breakeven was crossed about 10 years ago. Fusion is not going to be economically competitive. Ever. We know this already.
I wrote this 12 years ago, and every single word still applies:
Why fusion will never happen
I like fusion, really. I’ve talked to some of luminaries that work in the field, they’re great people. I love the technology and the physics behind it. But fusion as a power source is n…
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And the problem with something like a big tokamak is that it doesn’t even make sense for most use-cases where you’d be willing to use something very expensive — like for space or Antarctica or something like that. If someone comes up with a fusion reactor that was very expensive on a per kWh basis, but would fit within the hull of Starliner, that would still potentially be a very interesting development.
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Not every country is large and blessed with lots of areas that get lots of sunlight for Solar like the USA.Hit them up with this one:
A typical fusion plant, like a commercial version of ITER or ARC, is quite similar to a fission plant in overall terms. Yes, the reactor is dramatically different and there's all that cryo and lithium and so forth, but everything downstream from there is largely the same. You have a cooling loop in the core that pulls heat to a steam generator, that runs into a turbogenerator, and a third loop cools the resulting cooled steam back to water. This contrasts with a coal plant where there are only two loops because the steam is generated in the first loop. We can't do that in a fission plant, or fusion, because the neutrons cause the working fluid to become radioactive, at least enough that you need to isolate it. So at a minimum, that part of the plant is going to be basically the same.
We've been building plants of this sort for well over half a century now. We know how much they cost. Everything outside of the reactor costs about 60% of the total. In the case of Vogtle, the plant in total was about $12 a watt, so just the generator (etc) parts cost maybe 7 or 8 of that. So at an absolute minimum, even if the reactor costs zero dollars, we're still looking at around 7 to 8 bucks a watt (all in, including financing).
Ok, the problem. PV is currently being installed in the US with a 35% fleet CF for an average price of 95 cents. That's all the way from the field to the grid. PV with hybrid storage for 4-hours firm is currently under $4 and falling rapidly.
So... how do they propose their reactor design will cost negative three to four dollars per watt?
Economic breakeven was crossed about 10 years ago. Fusion is not going to be economically competitive. Ever. We know this already.
I wrote this 12 years ago, and every single word still applies:
Why fusion will never happen
I like fusion, really. I’ve talked to some of luminaries that work in the field, they’re great people. I love the technology and the physics behind it. But fusion as a power source is n…
Upvote
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There are few countries where land constraints would prevent the use of renewables. In those countries, energy can be imported from countries without the constraints.
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It's nice to see the fusion community making progress. Fusion power has (for the last 70 years anyway) always been 20 years in the future, maybe they have trimmed this to 10-16 years in the future?
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Vogtle 3&4 may have been around $12 per Watt around the time when they drove Westinghouse into bankruptcy, but they were at least $15.50 per Watt by the time they were completed by the taxpayers. Fusion would be more than that. Possibly by a few zeros.Hit them up with this one:
A typical fusion plant, like a commercial version of ITER or ARC, is quite similar to a fission plant in overall terms. Yes, the reactor is dramatically different and there's all that cryo and lithium and so forth, but everything downstream from there is largely the same. You have a cooling loop in the core that pulls heat to a steam generator, that runs into a turbogenerator, and a third loop cools the resulting cooled steam back to water. This contrasts with a coal plant where there are only two loops because the steam is generated in the first loop. We can't do that in a fission plant, or fusion, because the neutrons cause the working fluid to become radioactive, at least enough that you need to isolate it. So at a minimum, that part of the plant is going to be basically the same.
We've been building plants of this sort for well over half a century now. We know how much they cost. Everything outside of the reactor costs about 60% of the total. In the case of Vogtle, the plant in total was about $12 a watt, so just the generator (etc) parts cost maybe 7 or 8 of that. So at an absolute minimum, even if the reactor costs zero dollars, we're still looking at around 7 to 8 bucks a watt (all in, including financing).
Ok, the problem. PV is currently being installed in the US with a 35% fleet CF for an average price of 95 cents. That's all the way from the field to the grid. PV with hybrid storage for 4-hours firm is currently under $4 and falling rapidly.
So... how do they propose their reactor design will cost negative three to four dollars per watt?
Economic breakeven was crossed about 10 years ago. Fusion is not going to be economically competitive. Ever. We know this already.
I wrote this 12 years ago, and every single word still applies:
Why fusion will never happen
I like fusion, really. I’ve talked to some of luminaries that work in the field, they’re great people. I love the technology and the physics behind it. But fusion as a power source is n…
Upvote
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