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

I Was Wrong

In a recent post Help - I Need Somebody I asked for some help in explaining my ideas about a physics problem. It turns out I had a misconception. The short answer is that a particle that traverses an electric field and winds up at the same potential it started at will have the same energy it started with. 93143 was right all along. It took until Friday (from my post on Tuesday) for him to explain it well enough so that I got it. The above explanation should save him (and myself and others) a lot of time in the future.

Help - I Need Somebody

Could some one please explain to commenter 93143 in this thread why he has misunderstood physics re: particle accelerators/decelerators. I have lost my patience.

A Convenient Fiction

There is a serious misunderstanding about the state of science today. People look at all this shiny new hardware and imagine some unified state of knowledge behind it all. We have no such thing. What we actually have are islands of good enough knowledge.

There is not some great monolithic body of knowledge that can be described in a few equations understood by physics geeks and people with advanced math degrees.

Let me illustrate the problem with a recent personal anecdote. I was designing a gas valve for a fusion test reactor and commenter Brent pointed out that I had not taken into consideration something called the Knudsen Number. It was true. I had never even heard of it. The short version is: if gas pressures are low enough and the holes are small enough, you design the valve with one set of equations. If the holes are big and the pressure high you use another set of equations. In the middle? It is why engineers get paid the big bucks.

So the point of all that is that we don't have a unified knowledge set about gas flow through holes. We know a lot about aspects of this. We have islands of good knowledge and places where all is fuzziness or worse darkness.

Which brings me to a comment I made at Lubos Motl's Reference Frame, where Lubos is doing a very interesting exposition on the philosophy of science.

There is a lot of interesting work going on in the plasma physics area.

There are a lot of previously hidden self organizing principles being either discovered, re-discovered, or given new emphasis. Not just in quasi-static plasmas but dynamic ones as well.

We are starting to look at not just the frequencies of particles, but also the frequencies of assemblages of particles under the influence of various fields.

The tokamak guys are really struggling with this. They want a nice flat Maxwellian plasma and the plasma is not co-operating. It turns out that a true or even-quasi Maxwellian plasma may be impossible.

I think if we start looking at the facts, the idea of a Maxwellian plasma is a total fiction. The slightest deviation from Maxwellian distribution causes forces to build up and currents to flow.

So what we really need to make all this work is to delve into the self organizing principles of plasma and look at it from the point of view that a Maxwellian plasma is a convenient fiction for a certain class of problems.