Latest Update on ITER's First Plasma: 2025 and Beyond

[Salvador]

Much like competition between rival countries and superpowers had much to do with us now having a history of space exploration and other good things that first were done as a purely demonstration of force.There is a fine line in these events that if kept correctly can produce wonderful outcomes if done wrong can lead to war.

As for fusion it's more of a must have for our sustainable future than anything else.I wonder what kind of technological approach each of these companies given in the links use ?
Many like the tri Alpha seem to use something different than a tokamak and not IEC eitherMaybe we need a thread that would combine the most recent companies and their tech that their using so that one could follow more easily to what is going on, also some of the experts here could come in with some opinions about the likelihood of one of them becoming closer to net energy than the other.
Otherwise it's really hard to follow because all these companies produce modern and attracting welcome videos made by PR and marketing specialists that focus more on the image of the company and attracting investors than the real scientific background and problems each of these approaches face.

 

[Toast]

Fusion research has was originally carried out in secret by individual nations. However it was realized that separate nations were coming across the same problems and decided to join forces to make better progress on the common challenges. Declassification of fusion research happen in the 1958 Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva.

By combining the results for several experiments it was possible to find a scaling rule that can be used to extrapolate from existing reactor performances to a reactor that achieves break even or net energy production.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/092037969290016W

Graphs like this one from http://www.nap.edu/read/10816/chapter/5 can be produced

The extrapolation suggests that a large radius reactor would be required to achieve net energy production.

The required size was bigger than anything else and individual nations decided to team up to build this next step reactor. Building such a reactor as an individual nation would not only be expensive for the individual country but also difficult in terms of providing the technical skills and manufacturing facilities.

Teaming up as a group of nations might bring some bureaucratic and logistical difficulties but it was seen as the best option. Countries involved in ITER are sharing the component design and manufacture and aim to gain technological experience for the future.

Following on from ITER and using the results to further extrapolate the next reactor on the roadmap would be a demonstration power plant capable of producing electricity and self-sustaining in tritium fuel. Some countries are looking to take on this challenge on their own.

 

[tade]

ITER is supposed to have a major meeting this June, when is it going to be?

 

[jimgraber]

I think it is June 17, but I do not know for sure.

 

[the_wolfman]

ITER is supposed to have a major meeting this June, when is it going to be?

JIm is correct. The ITER Council Meeting is Jun 17-18.

The website http://www.firefusionpower.org/ is a great resource for finding information relevant to fusion such as news, meetings, reports, white papers, etc.

 

[mfb]

I'd have competing national projects. Competition between researchers always seems to have produced the most significant advances.

I would happily spend $1/year extra taxes to get another ITER (the actual costs are below $1/year and person), but that won't happen. Two projects for the same overall price would have meant two significantly smaller, less ambitious projects, probably failing the main idea of ITER, the positive energy balance.

First plasma is now planned for 2025, see the recent press release.

 

[Freemann]

Just based on the level of activity observed during a visit late last year, a decade may be optimistic. Urgency is entirely lacking. Few workers on site, not on weekends, with breaks for press briefings at completion of even minor construction milestones. Support elements such as the power management transformers and the magnet production plant, responsibilities assigned to the US and India respectively, were produced on schedule and are now just sitting on site in limbo, until the rest of the facility catches up.

You hit the point. I really wonder if the ITER community, with the exception of the US, really pays attention at such a critical aspect of the project. In my view, 3 critical aspects are mining the success of the project:

1. Stockpiles of tritium, vital as start-up inventory for the first fusion reactor(s) are peaking and in less than 2 decades will start to decrease fast, i.e. there may not be enough tritium to start a power plant if such delays in the planning, design and constrution are also present in the first demonstration power plant as they are for ITER. And as it is always said, ITER is a "key step" for the demonstration plant, so delaying ITER year after year jeopardized the whole endeavor.

2. who has not heard the typical joke about "fusion is the energy of the future... and it will always be" or "50 years ago we were also only 10 years long to reach fusion", etc.? fusion will start to loose credibility exponentially if every 2 years the "first plasma" is delayed another 5...

3. renewable energy (mainly wind and solar) are getting close to the so-called grid-parity, i.e. (solar is at the "break-even" of grid parity, off-shore looks closer, in-shore it is already)- With a market-entry of fusion in... 50 years? the conditions to be economically attractive will be harsh, so the odds that fusion will be born already dead are high.

A sense of urgency is therefore needed in the whole fusion community... unless the whole thing is just about funding research centers, universities and science in general, which is sadly my feeling since some years ago.

 

[quarkle]

I have worked in the Indian fusion community, and closely with people with ITER-India. From their perspective, the major reasons why ITER is proceeding so slow:

• People and politics. By politics I mean power struggles among people, not governmental politics. Each country and organizations has its own politics and when 20+ countries together to do something, it gets extremely convoluted and slows down everything. That also lead to a lot of stupid technical decisions. For example, they finalized engineering drawings before doing any neutronics studies which is a rather odd thing to do.
• Not all countries have easy access to all the software and code used, like MCNP. They are expected do to their share of work anyway. Another roadblock.

Again this is just what I could gather from common knowledge from the fusion community in India. Not to be taken as absolute fact.

 

[mfb]

Each country and organizations has its own politics and when 20+ countries together to do something, it gets extremely convoluted and slows down everything.

It works fine for projects like the LHC experiments. Not without any issues, of course, but it works without major delays. International collaborations can work.

 

[mheslep]

It works fine for projects like the LHC experiments. Not without any issues, of course, but it works without major delays. International collaborations can work.

Well it is known how to build yet another synchrotron, though the LHC is the largest. Higgs might not have been found but the LHC itself was eventually going to work.

Nobody knows for certain yet how to build a fusion reactor with net gain, so that the ITER design might never work. In large uncoherent groups chasing highly uncertain outcomes, many ill-considered opinions and self-indulgent agendas can ride high.

 

[mfb]

The LHC is a larger version of the Tevatron (factor 7 higher energy, factor 4 longer). The ITER is a larger version of JET (factor 4 in volume).
But I was talking about the experiments. ATLAS, CMS and LHCb are way more complex than any previous detector.

 

[quarkle]

I'm not comparing the technical complexity, here (though that definitely plays a part), but the sheer diversity and number of people and countries involved in ITER is is much much larger. The logistics are a nightmare. Also, we need a whole lot of new physics development, techniques, tools, databases and software that didn't exist before. And access to all these things by everybody involved. Politics can restrict this access. Anecdotally, for instance, I see huge delays in work completion simply because most people/organisations in India are unable to get MCNP licenses. They haven't really addressed those issues.

 

[mfb]

The ATLAS and CMS collaborations involve thousands of people from about 40 countries each, LHCb and ALICE are a bit smaller but still in the 4-digit range. Radiation hard electronics used there and irradiated components for testing are subject to various national and international laws, I guess ITER has the same issue.

The LHC experiments produce raw data of >100 Terabytes per second, most of it never leaves the detector - as you can guess, there is tons of dedicated hardware and software developed for the experiments to handle that huge amount of data.

 

[mheslep]

There are of course many instances of large international collaborations, and none of them to my knowledge have been successful in building a device with a stated specific outcome (5 mins net power) where the physics of the device is uncertain or unknown. Dedicated software, hardware, complexity, these do not require resolution of uncertain physics in the device itself.

 

[mheslep]

ITER first DT fusion schedule slips to 2035. As of 2010, the DT fusion schedule was 2027.

An updated schedule for the Iter fusion project has been approved by the Iter Council, which represents the countries taking part in the project. Under the new schedule, first plasma is now slated for 2025 and the start of deuterium-tritium operation is set for 2035...

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-New-schedule-agreed-for-Iter-fusion-project-2111164.html

 

[mfb]

On the positive side, the new schedule looks more realistic. As an example, all the objectives for 2016 have been met within schedule and budget.

 

[Vanadium 50]

As an example, all the objectives for 2016 have been met within schedule and budget.

Can you point me to the milestones? I went to https://www.iter.org/proj/ITERMilestones but it includes "3rd Monaco-ITER Conference", "ITER Scientist Fellow Network Launched" and "IC-19 Endorses Schedule". These may all be good and necessary things, but meeting them doesn't increase my confidence. Likewise for "Main Assembly Cranes Installed". The one that looks most confidence-building is "90% of toroidal field conductor completed" - but even this is not a statement about what the ITER team could do. It's a statement about what can be purchased from industry.

The date for first plasma has been falling back at about 1 year per year. This is a scary thing from a project management perspective. When external reports criticize management for a lack of urgency, this moves from 'scary' to 'terrifying'.

 

[mfb]

I just have a http://www.pro-physik.de/details/physiknews/10120491/Fusion_im_Zeitplan.html:

Insbesondere lobte das Gremium, dass die ITER-Organisation alle für 2016 geplanten Meilensteine pünktlich und I am Kostenrahmen erreichte. Beispielsweise wurde die erste supraleitende Spule für den Fusionsreaktor gewickelt und die Kräne in der Fertigungshalle installiert.

As two examples, the first superconducting coil has been wound and cranes for the manufacturing hall were installed.

 

[russ_watters]

On the positive side, the new schedule looks more realistic.

Well, it is axiomatic that if you are behind schedule, any new schedule that is longer than the previous will be more realistic...

As an example, all the objectives for 2016 have been met within schedule and budget.

Gawd, I sure hope that a schedule released 90% of the way through the first 10% of its duration will be accurate at least to the next 1% of the total duration!

 

[Vanadium 50]

Well, it is axiomatic that if you are behind schedule, any new schedule that is longer than the previous will be more realistic...

I had never considered that before.

 

[mfb]

Gawd, I sure hope that a schedule released 90% of the way through the first 10% of its duration will be accurate at least to the next 1% of the total duration!

The schedule was made in 2015.

Well, it is axiomatic that if you are behind schedule, any new schedule that is longer than the previous will be more realistic...

Not necessarily. You can overshoot, or get the order all wrong, or whatever. But in this case, "more realistic" = "they finally managed to stick to it for more than 1 year (which is the full time this schedule existed)".