ITER Meltdown

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) did not melt down from an excess of energy production. It is melting due to budget excesses.

It has been billed as the solution to tomorrow's energy crunch, but ITER, a massive fusion experiment by seven international partners, is under serious threat from a present-day problem: the financial crisis.

In a meeting on 26 May, the cash-strapped member states of the European Union (EU) were unable to agree on how to find the additional billions needed to finance construction of the giant reactor, which is sited near St-Paul-les-Durance, France. The EU is set to contribute 45% of the construction costs for ITER, which some estimates now put at €15 billion (US$19 billion) -- three times the 2006 cost estimate (see 'The ITER rollercoaster').

Left unresolved, the impasse in Europe will, at best, delay the project further. At worst, it could cause ITER to unravel entirely.

All the while Polywell Fusion and other small fusion programs are getting along on budgets 1/100th the size and are actually making progress towards answers.

You can learn the basics of fusion energy by reading Principles of Fusion Energy: An Introduction to Fusion Energy for Students of Science and Engineering

Polywell is a little more complicated. You can learn more about Polywell and its potential at: Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

The American Thinker has a good article up with the basics.

And the best part? We Will Know In Two Years or less.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Advanced And Delayed

Famulus at Prometheus Fusion has raised enough funds through Kick Starter to get the funds released for his amateur Polywell Fusion Reactor experiments. We look forward to the results in three months or so.

Small fusion is doing well. Big fusion not so much. The roughly $10 billion ITER Project in France is being delayed again. By almost another year. Yeah. I know. Cue up the jokes.

The scheduled start-up date for the ITER fusion reactor project looks set to slip again by 10 months to November 2019. The new date comes less than a year after the start-up was shifted from 2016 to 2018. William Brinkman, director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science, said at a meeting of fusion energy advisers on Monday that the schedule was changed at a meeting of ITER heads of delegations in Paris in late February.

ITER, an enormous research fusion reactor which is shortly due to begin construction in France, is a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States and is due to cost somewhere between €5 billion and €10 billion. (The cost is a current bone of contention.) Over the past couple of years, the funding partners have become alarmed about the rapidly escalating cost estimates and delays in getting the project moving. The ITER council ordered reviews of the costing system and the project management. Sources say that the European Union, which, as host, is shouldering 45% of the construction cost, has been calling for more construction time because of concern that pushing ahead too fast could lead to unacceptable technical risks. Although Brinkman does not name the E.U., he says that a delay until 2020 was requested but after objections the meeting settled on a start date of late in 2019.

I can tell you from practical experience that fudging the dates like that means the project is in way more trouble than the people involved are letting on.

And since from time to time there are people reading here who need to be brought up to speed on fusion I'm reposting my usual: You can learn the basics of fusion energy by reading Principles of Fusion Energy: An Introduction to Fusion Energy for Students of Science and Engineering

Polywell is a little more complicated. You can learn more about Polywell and its potential at: Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

The American Thinker has a good article up with the basics.

And the best part? We Will Know In Two Years or less.

I'm a big fan of small fusion projects. Especially after hearing what Plasma Physicist and author of Principles of Plasma PhysicsDr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good." And they seem really hard to build even. And who knows, if the Polywell experiments being done by the US Navy or Famulus are successful the ITER project may just wind up as a big hole in the ground in France.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Shake Up On The Way

For those of you not familiar with Latin "iter" means "the way". And the ITER Fusion program now headquartered in France is undergoing a top management shake up.

In an effort to put the world's largest scientific experiment back on track after delays and cost overruns, Europe is shaking up the agency overseeing its portion of the multinational ITER reactor.

On 16 February, Frank Briscoe, a British fusion scientist, will take the reins as interim director of Fusion for Energy (F4E), the agency in Barcelona, Spain, that manages Europe's ITER contribution — the largest of any partner's. Briscoe replaces Didier Gambier, a French physicist who joined the F4E as director when it formed in 2007. Gambier was originally appointed for a five-year term.

The European Union (EU) is also formulating a plan to complete construction on the multibillion-dollar machine in 2019, a year after currently scheduled, Nature has learned.

ITER aims to prove the viability of fusion power by using superconducting magnets to squeeze a plasma of heavy hydrogen isotopes to temperatures above 150 million °C. When full-scale experiments begin in 2026, the machine should produce ten times the power it consumes.

It seems the shake up is due in part to unhappy customers. You know - the people putting up the money.

Europe has faced increasing criticism from ITER's six other international partners: Japan, South Korea, Russia, India, China and the United States. A budget proposed last week by US president Barack Obama would slash America's funding for ITER in 2011 by 40%, to US$80 million; it cited "the slow rate of progress by the [ITER Organization] and some Members' Domestic Agencies". And on 2 February, Evgeny Velikhov, a Russian fusion researcher and head of ITER's council, called Europe a "weak link". "Unfortunately, their organizational structure is very poor," he told Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview that appeared on a Russian government website.

Finishing ITER in 2019, a goal that the F4E is now working towards with industrial contractors, would involve risks such as producing components in parallel, but scientists think that those risks can be managed. "There should be no doubt that Europe is trying hard to get ITER ready in the shortest time that is realistic," says one senior European scientist. The new schedule will be presented to other ITER partners at a meeting on 23–24 February in Paris.

In a recent post, Spiraling Out Of Control, I discussed some of the financial problems at ITER. And for those of you interested in the technical problems may I suggest (actually highly recommend) the Talk Polywell link at the end of that article.

And let me leave you with a few words from a Polywell Fusion fan who is no fan of Tokamak designs (ITER and similar devices): Plasma Physicist and author of Principles of Plasma Physics Dr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

And the best thing about Polywell is what Physicist Rick Nebel, who is now herding the project, has to say about it: We Will Know In Two Years or less.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Spiraling Out Of Control

I have covered the troubles the ITER fusion project is having in ITER Gets Clipped which covered the American view of ITER's troubles. The The European Voice is taking a look at the problems from an European view.

ITER's projected costs have soared since the first estimates were made in 2001. Contributions will generally be made in kind (through provisions of construction materials, reactor components, labour and expertise). The EU's total in-kind contribution was estimated at €1.491 billion in 2001. By 2008, when the EU's Fusion for Energy agency, which was set up to manage the EU contribution to ITER, reviewed the costs, the estimate had risen to €3.5bn.
Rising costs

Concerns about the ballooning budget led the Commission last year to set up an expert group tasked with reviewing the construction costs. The group's report, released to member states last month and seen by European Voice, said that the construction costs alone could rise as high as €1.5bn (compared to a 2001 estimate of €598 million).

The report said that the increase was a result of “omissions or underestimates” in the original estimates, inflation in concrete and steel prices and “changes in specifications”.

The Commission has set up a task-force to identify sources of additional funding for ITER. One option being considered is a loan from the European Investment Bank.

The latest budget numbers I have seen have the project estimate at around $7 billion US (€5.1 billion).

Interesting that the budget was low balled to get things going and then things started spiraling out of control. Making up for missing resources in out years always costs a lot more than budgeting for them from the start. We see this in the space program all too often. The reason is that you have people you have to keep on board while changes are being made. What we in engineering like to refer to as "the burn rate" - the amount you have to spend to keep going while actual progress halts to make the changes. Every day's delay can cost millions of dollars. Then there is the problem of bringing new people up to speed. Adding people to a late project will often increase the delay over what making do with the people you have will cause. It is easy to get into a regenerative mode where you can never finish at an acceptable time with an acceptable budget. Another thing that happens when you add new people to a project is that the design suffers because the new people never know as much as the old hands.

Fredrick Brooks originally looked at this problem with respect to big software projects. He published his observations in a 1975 book called The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering.

It is probably the best book on big project management ever written so far. I have used his insights often in my engineering career. Management will hardly ever listen to these types of insights at the beginning. But occasionally you can get them to accept the insights provided once a project is in trouble.

Let me add that the much smaller Polywell Fusion project is not having any such difficulty. Physicist Rick Nebel said of his WB-7 experiment: it "runs like a top". Rick has been mum about WB-8 progress. Since he has the same team that did WB-7 working on WB-8, I expect he will deliver the knowledge required on time and within budget. Of course he has an advantage. It is easier to keep a small project ($ millions) on time than it is to do the same for a large project ($ billions). If the experiments look promising I expect that he will have a lot more trouble getting a real power plant operational. The logistics get harder.

You can look at recent list of the design problems ITER faces at Talk Polywell.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

ITER Gets Clipped

It looks like the Obama Administration is cutting back its support for ITER in next year's Federal Energy Budget.

...funding for DOE’s fusion energy sciences (FES) program gets clipped from an estimated $426 million this year to a requested $380 million next year, a reduction of 10.8%. That reduction would come out of the United States’s contribution to the international fusion experiment, ITER, which will be built in Cadarache, France. Under the proposed budget, ITER would get $80 million next year, down from an estimated $135 million this year. The decrease marks the latest dip on the ITER budget roller coaster. In 2008, Congress zeroed out $150 million of spending on ITER in a squabble with the White House. The project got $124 million the following year.

Ironically, the current cut comes about because ITER itself has slowed down as researchers contend with design revisions that could double its $7 billion price tag. “We need to make sure that we don’t get ahead of the project as a whole,” says Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, home of the U.S. ITER project office. The proposed $80 million would keep U.S. researchers fully engaged next year, Mason says. However, he worries that the dip this year will make the required funding increases in 2012 and beyond all the larger and harder to achieve.

I looked at the ongoing design review in ITER Back To The Drawing Board. I believe ITER is in big trouble for two reasons. One is that the engineering is not solid even for an experimental project and also that even if it is successful in its 40 or 50 year time line it will never produce a commercially viable fusion reactor.

For viability I like Polywell which is currently being funded by the US Navy. For about $10 to $20 million spent over the next Two Years or less we will have an answer. You can learn the basics of fusion energy by reading Principles of Fusion Energy: An Introduction to Fusion Energy for Students of Science and Engineering

Polywell is a little more complicated. You can learn more about Polywell and its potential at: Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

The American Thinker has a good article up with the basics.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

ITER Back To The Drawing Board

The ITER fusion test reactor project is getting a schedule review [pdf] because the project is seriously out of whack.

The scientific and engineering team building the ITER fusion reactor failed to win an expected endorsement from the project’s governing council last week. The council, which represents the seven international partners in the project—China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States—sent the team back to do more work on the proposed construction schedule for the mammoth undertaking.

So what is being done to fix this mismatch between means and ends?

...ITER staff have been racing for months to get the final project baseline documents, which describe the design, cost estimates, and planned schedule, ready for the 18–19 November council meeting at Cadarache (Science, 13 November, p. 932). But some council members voiced concern that the schedule, which aimed to start the reactor by 2018, was not realistic and that there was too high a risk that some part of the immensely complicated effort could go wrong.

A slip in the schedule would invariably mean increased costs, and the council is already concerned about budget estimates, which, sources say, may have doubled from 􀀀5 billion since the partners signed up in 2006. So the council told ITER staff to nail down more firmly the risks, both technical and organizational, involved in the schedule and come back in February with earliest and latest possible start-up dates.

And they are not even going to discuss costs until they get a schedule estimate. Good.

I wonder if the fact that Focus Fusion, and Tri-Alpha Energy, and General Fusion, and other groups promise results much sooner at much lower costs also has something to do with the reevaluation.

Of course you all know my favorite. The Polywell Fusion Reactor. You can learn the basics of fusion energy by reading Principles of Fusion Energy: An Introduction to Fusion Energy for Students of Science and Engineering

Polywell is a little more complicated. You can learn more about Polywell and its potential at: Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

The American Thinker has a good article up with the basics. And the best part? We Will Know In Two Years.

Here is a good page to keep up with ITER news. I love what it says at the top of the page:

18 Years Until 1st Q = 10 DT pulse 400s long at 500MW on ITER

Plasma Physicist and author of Principles of Plasma PhysicsDr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The ITER Mafia

The Air Force has a gang of guys called the Fighter Mafia who work to improve the performance of American fighter aircraft.

In fusion physics we have the the ITER Mafia gobbling up all the funds and holding back fusion progress.

Looking For A Schedule

The joke that is the ITER Fusion Project in France just got a lot funnier today.

The EC said it welcomed the decision by the parties to adopt a "phased approach to the completion of ITER construction as a working basis for development of the project baseline."

In particular the EC said it welcomed a proposal to finalize a realistic schedule for the project.

"This is key to ensure a sound management of the project, which in turn will warrant running ITER in the most cost-effective and efficient way," the EC said.

They would welcome a realistic proposal. What have they been accepting up 'til now? Smoke, mirrors, fairy dust, and regular visits to the best brothels of Paris?

Sound management? The tokamak ELM problem has been known for 20 years. For ITER a solution was proposed after the design was done. "Sound management?" Surely you are joking.

Even the lawyers in Congress are starting to notice. If the American contribution to ITER goes down the whole DOE Fusion edifice goes down because it is built around ITER. Most of the small scale experiments are in support of ITER. And a big chunk of dough (something like $160 million a year) gets sent to ITER as either cash or payment in kind (equipment). Something like 4 different nations are going to supply the superconducting wire for the magnets. That is nuts.

Now what would a rational fusion program look like? Start with twenty small projects at $2 million a year per. That is $40 million. Add a $5 million slush fund to that to give boosts to promising experiments. Add in 5 projects at $10 million a year each. Add in one project at $20 million and one project at $40 million. That leaves $5 million a year for investigating new ideas and managing the overall project. And there you have managed to spend $160 million a year on a Balanced program that actually has a chance to achieve an economical working fusion reactor in twenty years or less.

And that is the biggest strike against ITER. Even its proponents agree that a working fusion reactor based on its principles will not be economical. On top of that the ITER approach is not expected to give results for 100 years. As some one said to me in an e-mail recently, "when I was a kid it was only 30 years." It is madness to go on this way.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Main Street Savvy

I have a friend with main street savvy.

He thinks we are in for 5 to 7 years of treading water.

One problem is that we have automated away manufacturing jobs. Making stuff no longer requires near as many workers for a given amount of output.

This is similar to what happened to agriculture in the 20s.

At this point there is no “big new thing” to take up the slack. Biotech is not ready. Green energy in most cases is a net loss (green energy is higher cost than coal). Fusion if it was ready tomorrow would take 5 to 10 years to make an economic impact. And fusion is not ready for roll out tomorrow.

If the research goes well the Bussard Fusion Reactor (BFR) might be ready in 5 years. Projects like ITER are not only not ready (30 years more to go) but the energy is expected to cost 5X to 10X current sources.

The nice thing about the BFR project is that it can be done for about $200 million and will take 5 years. If the answer is positive energy costs will be from 1/2 to 1/10th current prices.

What needs to be done is a lot more research on a lot of things. Research is labor intensive. However, it can’t absorb a lot of labor. Say we started a 100,000 new research projects (there aren’t that many good ideas to fund) that would only absorb 500,000 people. Of that number 100,000 would have to be highly trained. We don’t have that many highly trained people not already involved in research.

We will pull out of this. It is going to take time.

ITER Is The Fusion Reactor Of The Future

In fact from the look of things it may always be the Fusion Reactor of The Future.

A massive international nuclear fusion experiment planned for Cadarache, France, is set to cost up to 30% more than anticipated and be delayed by as much as three years, governments will learn next week.

Construction has not even begun on the ITER fusion reactor, which has been beset by political wrangling since its inception. Now its seven international backers are to be told they will have to come up with an extra €1.2 billion–1.6 billion (US$1.9 billion–2.5 billion) on top of its current €5-billion construction budget if the project is to be realized.

A report from a group of scientific advisers says the additional money is needed for critical design changes and for coordinating between the participant nations. And the experiment, already delayed, will not be completed until anywhere from one to three years after its current 2018 due date.

Critics expect more cost hikes. “Personally, I think the price will double before it’s done,” says Stephen Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, a research and educational foundation based in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Let me see if I can guess a little about the problems. This phrase "coordinating between the participant nations" particularly stood out. Usually what that means in government speak is lavish parties disguised as conferences at exotic destinations.

And the redesign? Some of the problems were known for twenty years. They were only addressed after the initial design was completed. First you sell the sizzle. Then, when the customer has bought in, you advise that the steak will cost extra.

I hinted at this in my piece The Secret Of The Tokamak.

Here is the dirty little tokamak secret - "The last one didn't work, shows no promise of working, and new difficulties have been encountered. I have a plan. We will make the next one 3X bigger." For 40 years.

Eventually the marks wise up.

The US cut ITER out of the Federal Budget earlier this year. Maybe it was not just a move by Congress to PO Bush. Maybe it had something to do with Congress actually paying attention to the real experts.

I have heard rumors that Congress is interested in the Bussard Fusion Reactor. If it works out (Bussard Fusion Reactor Funded) ITER (a tokamak design) would be a waste. Or as Plasma Physicist Dr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

I think the problem with the Euros is that they are slow learners. Stephen Dean nails it at the end of the piece quoted above:

Dean anticipates that the new budget will ultimately be approved. “This thing has gotten a life of its own — it’s almost irrelevant how much it costs or what it’s for.”

At least it is on their dime. Mostly.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Big Science

Popular Mechanics has an article on how fusion research ought to be done.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — This is what a fusion lab is supposed to be like. As I walk in, a woman’s voice is on the speakers, counting down from 10. Banks of chairs face banks of computer monitors, where data is literally streaming across application windows that are pulsing, multicolored and reassuringly complex.

Now contrast that with another lab doing similar work. Five people. Total.

And what does the MIT Lab predict the outcome of their experiments (if successful) will be?

But even ITER, which is scheduled to be built within 8 to 10 years, is intended as a research facility—not as an answer to our current energy dilemma. It might produce an overall surplus of energy, but it won’t be cost-effective production. For that, Porkolab estimates we’ll have to wait for ITER to show results, possibly in the 2020s, and then wait another decade or so while demo reactors are built. That means we’d see economically feasible fusion power by 2035, at the earliest, and increasingly efficient commercial reactors somewhere in the middle of the century.

Even that protracted timeline now appears optimistic. Since 2006, when seven member countries committed to the ITER’s $10 billion budget, federal funding for scientific research in the United States appears to have bottomed out. The U.S. agreed to pay 9.1 percent of the project’s total cost—but of the $160 million contribution planned for this year, Congress has approved just $10.7 million. Porkolab says eight ITER engineers had been laid off without severance pay.

Now contrast that with the WB-7 project. They expect to complete their second round of experiments (the first were done on WB-6 in 2005) in the next 2 to 5 months. The cost to the US Navy? $1.8 million for WB-7 experiments.

If those experiments are successful they expect to have a net power test machine built within 5 years at a cost of about $40 million a year (average). It sure beats waiting until the 2020s to see results.

So what is wrong with the tokamak design? I'll let the MIT guys speak for themselves:

Here at MIT, the fusion center’s primary research tool is the Alcator C-MOD, the largest university-run fusion reactor in the world, and one of only three “tokamaks” in the country. Tokamaks are reactors that use magnetic fields to control the flow of plasma. Extreme machines like the C-MOD, which has the most powerful magnetic fields of any tokamak (and some 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s) have enhanced our understanding of fusion. But a truly efficient reaction, with more energy released than poured in, is still decades away.

The problem, Porkolab says, is turbulence. To increase the chances of a fusion reaction, a cloud of plasma must be incredibly hot and dense. As the atoms become more closely packed and excited, the natural tendency for nuclei to repel each other can be overcome. C-MOD uses microwaves to heat the ionized gas and magnets to shape it, building up pressure within the plasma. But as any meteorologist can tell you, juggling temperature and pressure is a recipe for bad weather. “We have our own storms, inside the plasma, just like in the atmosphere,” Porkolab says. Temperature gradients within the plasma can lead to eddies, and the more unstable the cloud becomes, the more heat it loses. When the temperature gets low enough, the reaction dies. Plasma turbulence, in other words, is the biggest obstacle to fusion, limiting current reactors to brief pulses and preventing the kind of long-term reaction necessary for true power production.

Essentially the tokamak is a fight with nature. Nature wants to do one thing the scientists want it to do something else.

Contrast that with the Bussard Fusion Reactor. The design is one where instead of fighting natural tendencies it takes advantage of them.

In any case we will know a lot more in a few months. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

The Secret Of The Tokamak

As many of you know I'm not fond of the Tokamak/ITER approach to nuclear fusion. I do not believe we will ever get an economical fusion plant out of those experiments. Congress has basically cut ITER out of the US Federal budget.

Here is the dirty little tokamak secret - "The last one didn't work, shows no promise of working, and new difficulties have been encountered. I have a plan. We will make the next one 3X bigger." For 40 years.

Eventually the marks wise up.

ITER Budget Cut

Science Magazine reports that the Federal Science budget has cut ITER funds to zero.

The bill set the budget at DOE's Office of Science at $4.055 billion--$342 million short of the requested amount--and the shortfall comes mainly out of two programs: fusion sciences and high-energy physics. Congress realized some savings by allotting nothing for U.S. participation in the international fusion reactor experiment, ITER, which is set to begin construction next year in Cadarache, France (ScienceNOW, 21 November 2006). Although appropriators expressly forbid DOE to shuffle money from other programs to satisfy its planned $149 million contribution in 2008, Marburger predicts that the prohibition will not stand. "I can't see DOE not living up to its obligations," he says. "The department will have to use its money to stay in the project, so [the language] really just amounts to another earmark."

I have heard rumors that Congress is interested in the Bussard Fusion Reactor. If it works out (Bussard Fusion Reactor Funded) ITER (a tokamak design) would be a waste. Or as Plasma Physicist Dr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

We will know the answer in 3 to 6 months. At that point in time if Bussard IEC Fusion Reactors look like a dead end the budget for ITER can always be restored. Or the money could be put into other IEC devices. The advantage of IEC is that the budgets required for confirming experiments are small and the time frame for proof or disproof is short. Years, not decades or centuries.

The Euros Are Getting Organized

The Europeans have some of the highest gasoline taxes in the developed world. Certainly higher than in America. And yet....

In common with the rest of the world, Europe is now having to face up to the fact that a cheap and plentiful supply of oil and other fossil fuels has led to a long term under investment in energy technologies. Public funding for energy R&D in the EU member states declined between 1991 and 2005 in real terms, when it stood at around €2.2 billion a year. Of this, almost three-quarters is concentrated in only three countries. Private sector investment in energy R&D shows a similar pattern.

We don't seem to have those kinds of problems in the USA. I wonder why?

As a result the process of energy technology innovation is riddled with structural weaknesses, such as long lead times to market, incompatible infrastructures and limited market incentives. In the era of cheap oil, the take up of new energy technologies was hampered because they were inevitably more expensive.

Now, as oil nudges $100 per barrel and the IPCC’s warnings on global warming become yet more dire, the European Commission wants to accelerate low carbon energy development and deployment. The strategy highlights 14 technologies it plans to promote, ranging from wind and solar power, to decarbonised fossil fuel and nuclear fission and fusion.

Dire warnings and $100 a bbl oil and the Euros can't find opportunities? Something must be strangling their economies. What could it be?

The problem is how to jump start energy research from its current low base. Although member states share some priorities, pan European cooperation is low, and until now there has been no setting of priorities at a European level. Yet the capital intensive nature of energy technologies – witness the ITER nuclear fusion project – makes it essential to find synergies and build economies of scale.

Oh yeah. ITER. The great Euro fusion boondoggle that will get us the practical knowledge to build a working fusion power plant in no less than 30 years.

America is a little different. We have lots of fusion projects going on and we are a member of the ITER club too. Let us start with a venture capital start up Tri Alpha Energy.

That is not all, we have Robert Bussard's Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion which is currently being funded by the US Navy.

The above reactor can burn Deuterium which is very abundant and produces lots of neutrons or it can burn a mixture of Hydrogen and abundant Boron 11 which does not.

The implication of it is that we will know in 6 to 9 months if the small reactors of that design are feasible.

If they are we could have fusion plants generating electricity in 10 years or less depending on how much we want to spend to compress the time frame (my best guess is that a crash program could build an operating power plant in 3 to 5 years - if the experiments now underway green light that course of action). A much better investment than the CO2 sequestration non-sense promoted by the EU.

BTW Bussard is not the only thing going on in IEC. There are a few government programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana among others.

The Japanese and Australians also have programs.

So let me ask. How is it the Australians can afford a program which may produce actual energy soon or at the very least is going to produce some knowledge on the cheap and yet the Euros can't afford it? It is a wonderment. It is kind of like they have killed off or driven out a major portion of their risk takers.

Welcome to America. Where all kinds of ideas get tried. Even long shots. Like ITER.

Diamond Encrusted Fusion Reactor

It is ITER time again. They are experimenting with diamond coatings to withstand the high heat loads at the walls of the ITER reactor. One thing to keep in mind. Diamond is good for a few thousand degrees Kelvin. ITER plasma is in the 100 million degree range. If plasma and diamond meet - diamond doesn't have a chance.

I found a press release from sp3 Diamond Technologies, a company involved in the semiconductor industry but with tentacles in many places announce that their technology is being used by Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. The University is using the technology to evaluate the benefits of using diamond-coated reactors for the next generation of fusion reactors due to diamonds’ ability to withstand the intense heat involved in the process.

The University has purchased one of sp3’s CVD diamond deposition tools as part of a €10 billion research project aimed at developing waste-free nuclear energy without contributing to global warming via the Euro International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program.

ITER may be really good science, the future of low cost energy it is not.

Holding Back Fusion

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has just released a report on the state of nuclear fusion in America. It is not good. Here is an excerpt from the executive summary.

GAO has identified several challenges DOE faces in managing alternative fusion research activities. First, NNSA and the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (OFES), which manage the inertial fusion program within DOE, have not effectively coordinated their research activities to develop inertial fusion as an energy source. For example, they do not have a coordinated research plan that identifies key scientific and technological issues that must be addressed to advance inertial fusion energy and how their research activities would meet those goals.

Second, DOE may find it difficult to manage competing funding priorities to advance both ITER-related research and alternative magnetic fusion approaches. DOE officials told GAO they are focusing limited resources on ITER-related research activities. As a result, as funding for ITER-related research has increased, the share of funding for the most innovative alternative magnetic fusion research activities decreased from 19 percent of the fusion research budget in fiscal year 2002 to 13 percent in fiscal year 2007. According to DOE officials, this level of funding is sufficient to meet research objectives. However, university scientists involved in fusion research told us that this decrease in funding has led to a decline in research opportunities for innovative concepts, which could lead to a simpler, less costly, or faster path to fusion energy, and reduced opportunities to attract students to the fusion sciences and train them to fulfill future workforce needs. Finally, while the demand for scientists and engineers to run experiments at ITER and inertial fusion facilities is growing, OFES does not have a human capital strategy to address expected future workforce shortages. These shortages are likely to grow as a large part of the fusion workforce retires over the next 10 years.

Inertial fusion is all about using laser pulses to create enough pressure to cause a pellet of fuel frozen to near absolute zero to implode with enough pressure to fuse the frozen elements. So far there is no plan to turn this into a power producer. Brilliant management. Just brilliant.

In addition they have no plan to meet their manpower requirements by training scientists and engineers. They should try reading The Mythical Man Monthby Brooks. They are setting themselves up for a regenerative failure.

Another inertial approach is the beam or IEC approach. Standing for Inertial Electrostatic Confinement. This uses electrostatic fields to focus and accelerate the beams with various methods used to reduce beam collisions with the accelerator electrodes. The Bussard Fusion Reactor is one example of such a device which uses magnetic fields to reduce losses. There are others.

Then we have the problem of ITER sucking up funds like a runaway Hoover. Choking off other promising approaches. Like alternative magnetic fusion approaches such as the Spheromak. Between all the magnetic approaches such as ITER, other tokamaks, other magnetic confinement approaches, and laser implosion, the budget for various IEC approaches is tiny indeed.

Here is an excerpt from the full report.

The ITER Organization faces several management challenges that may limit its ability to build ITER on time and on budget and may affect U.S. costs. Many of these challenges stem from the difficulty of coordinating the efforts of six countries and the European Union that are designing and building components for ITER and, as members of the ITER Organization, must reach consensus before making critical management decisions. The key management challenges include (1) developing quality assurance standards to test the reliability and integrity of the components made in different countries; (2) assembling, with a high level of precision, components and parts built in different countries; (3) finding a new vendor if a country fails to build a component on time or does not meet quality assurance standards; (4) developing a contingency fund that adequately addresses cost overruns and schedule delays; and (5) developing procedures that describe which countries will be responsible for paying for cost overruns.

I smell a boondoggle. The Euros had this problem with the Airbus A380 Fiasco. So you can't say they don't have enough experience to screw things up. They have had practice.

Here is more about the laser inertial confinement program.

DOE has three separately funded inertial fusion research programs: NNSA’s inertial fusion research activities related to the nuclear weapons program, a High Average Power Laser Program (HAPL) to develop technology needed for energy for which funding is directed by a congressional conference committee, and OFES’s inertial fusion research activities aimed at exploring the basic science for energy applications. Experiments in each of these programs help advance inertial fusion energy, but these experiments are not coordinated and each program has a separate mission and different scientific and technological objectives.

Evidently the European management model is popular in the USA too. Who knew?

I'm not sure exactly what program is being referred to here. It looks like IEC which is distributed among a number of labs and university locations.

As another alternative to both the laser systems and the Z-machine, OFES is funding experiments using heavy ion beams to produce fusion energy at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Heavy ion beams are made by a particle accelerator—a device that uses electrical fields to propel electrically charged particles at high speeds. The heavy ions, which are heavier than carbon atoms, collide with the targets and cause the compression and heat needed to release fusion energy.

However, in fiscal year 2006, OFES spent about $21 million to fund 25 small-scale experiments at 11 universities, 4 national laboratories, and 2 private companies to test 7 types of magnetic fusion devices with different shapes and magnetic currents. This level of funding represents a decline over the past 6 fiscal years—from $26 million in fiscal year 2002 to $20 million in fiscal year 2007. University scientists involved in innovative fusion research told us that this decrease in funding was not consistent with a 1999 DOE fusion energy science advisory committee study that recommended OFES increase funding for innovative magnetic research activities. OFES relies on this advisory committee to establish priorities for the fusion program and to provide a basis for the allocation of funding.

However, since that report, the share of funding for innovative research activities has decreased even as funding for fusion research has increased. The share of funding has dropped from 19 percent of the fusion research budget in fiscal year 2002 to 13 percent in fiscal year 2007. In addition, while OFES’s 5-year budget plan shows an increase in funding for fusion research activities in fiscal years 2008 through 2011, most of this funding will be used for ITER- and tokamak-related research activities at the major facilities. DOE officials also told us there are planned increases in funding for innovative devices, but only to maintain the same level of research. According to university scientists, a number of innovative approaches are ready to advance to the next stage of development that would test the feasibility of producing fusion energy or conduct more sophisticated experiments, but DOE has no plans to advance any of these approaches because it may require an increase in funding to conduct more sophisticated experiments. DOE’s fusion energy advisory committee has not assessed the appropriate level of funding between ITER- and tokamak-related activities and innovative concepts since 1999, before the U.S. joined ITER and it became a priority.

So they are choking small money fusion research to pay for ITER. This is nuts when any one of the small approaches migh deliver a breakthrough that could reduce the time and money to develop actual fusion power.

So you get the idea. Typical big governmentitis. The ideas with the most political clout win. Ideas with small experiments, few researchers and low cost results get squeezed out because they lack a constituency.

Pretty much what Dr. Bussard said in the audio found here and the video found here.

If you think it is time for a change, contact your government.

House of Representatives
The Senate
The President

Give them an earful. The future will soon be upon us and we need to be ready.

ITER - The Other Side

I have been going hot and heavy on the Bussard Fusion Reactor. I think it is time to present the other side. DNA India reports: ITER is ‘the way’ to the future of energy. Well I don't believe it. I think ITER (The International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor) is doing wonderful physics. The chances for a working power plant from this effort, in my opinion, are slim and none. From DNA India:

Ever wondered what makes the sun so hot? The process is called fusion and it involves the coming together of four hydrogen nuclei to form a helium nucleus. It is accompanied by the release of huge amounts of energy which we get in the form of light and heat. Now, scientists are trying to replicate the fusion process in an experimental project and India is playing a crucial role in it.

The International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor (ITER) project is a joint international research project that will demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of fusion power. The countries involved in this one-of-its-kind project are USA, European Union, Japan, Russia, India, China and South Korea.

Carlos Alejaldre, deputy director general of ITER, who was in Mumbai to attend a colloquium at BARC spoke extensively on the project. Terming it as one of the most challenging projects ever, Alejaldre said the project would integrate together key technologies from various fields.

So what is the project all about? “The project involves production of 500 MW of power for a considerable amount of time by fusing deuterium and tritium (both are isotopes of hydrogen),” Alejaldre said.

And this is no ordinary power production by any means. “Deuterium and Tritium would be fused at temperatures ranging from 100 to 200 million degrees and at pressure of 106 atmosphere,” he added.

The construction of the reactor would begin in 2009 and it will become operational in 2016.

That is seven years of effort. Added to the 40+ years already invested in the project.

The one thing you have to say about it is that it is training a lot of plasma physicists.

Alejaldre believes the advance in fusion technology has been faster than Moore’s law which predicts advances in the power of computer processor. “ITER represents a quantum leap in fusion power production. The maximum amount of power generated in a fusion power plant so far was 16 MW. In ITER, this number will swell to 500 MW,” he said.

So when will the fusion power of ITER actually reach home? “ITER is a purely experimental project. The 500 MW power won’t be connected to the grid. However, if all goes well with ITER, a machine considerably bigger than ITER should start generating electrical power by 2040.”

He neglects one important detail. It is easy to get 500 MW out if you are putting 1,000 MW in. So far no reactor in the ITER series has produced net power. The ITER will have lots of superconducting magnets. Be 31.5 meters (103 ft) high and weigh as much as an aircraft carrier. That would put it in the 100,000 ton range.

It will also be a huge neutron generator, making it excellent for producing plutonium from uranium.

By contrast the Bussard design, Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion, when fueled with Boron 11 produces no neutrons, would be about 6 ft across for 100 MW output and about 8 ft across for 500 MW output. Plus it could deliver power to the grid without the need for steam generators, turbines, generators, steam condensers, and the rest of that kind of thermal plant that ITER requires to turn its output into electricity. BTW such a plant operationg at the highest standard temperatures for steam plants could turn maybe as much as 40% of the thermal energy into electricity. Sixty percent is a big giveaway in terms of making the ITER monsters practical.

The Bussard design is a better bet and if it works power plants could be in mass production in 15 years or less from the day the final research and development work starts.

Cross Posted at Classical Values