(Just to elaborate on ITER. It's the classic too big to fail project, not to mention it has basically one feature: it's so over-engineered that it can't fail. It's almost the equivalent of the LHC. Built to "prove" a theory. Of course almost everyone wished some beyond the standard model physics to pop up at the LHC, it didn't as far as I know. Almost nobody wishes for unexpected things to happen at ITER, so it's supre boring. With a really eye-watering price tag. But at the same time it is a big umbrella project to get the necessary components designed, built, and tested for fusion. It's accumulating know-how, training experts, it's literally paving the fucking way. Hence the name. And in that context it's basically free. Companies spend more on filing and litigating dumb parents, and those are obvious too.)
To use a physics analogy, gargantuan megaprojects like ITER develop their own selfgravitation that sucks in money and innovation, crushing engineers pitilessly under the weight of the bureaucracy.
To further abuse analogies, megaprojects suffer from something akin to the tyranny of the rocket equation: Because they're huge and expensive, they have to be broken up and doled out to disparate teams (countries even!), subcontractors, etc... Because there are many organisations involved, the friction of the interactions between force managers to plan ahead. Because planning ahead is required, only existing, established technologies can be used.
QED: It is not possible to do "innovation" with megaprojects, their mega size inherently prevents any possibility of true innovation occurring! The bigger they are, the less innovative they are.
I cannot emphasise this enough: Elements of the ITER project have been planned 30 years ahead! That's insanity. That's using 1990s technology in the 2020s! There is no possible path through ITER and then DEMO to achieve commercial power generation before 2050. None. There is not even a hope of such a thing.
Most critically, ITER used a legacy superconducting wire in their designs, which has a lower maximum magnetic field strength compared to more modern types. Because of the highly nonlinear scaling (quartic?) with increasing field strength, this is the fundamental limit to achieving break-even fusion, but they were forced to start planning without it.
They should have done what Tesla did: Focus on the batteries as the primary thing, everything else is secondary. ITER should have focused on the superconducting wires above all else for at least the first two decades of the project, before even thinking of actually opening a CAD program to design a Tokamak!
ITER reminds me of the Space Shuttle, the Joint Strike Fighter, and (to give a private sector example) Intel Itanium.
Large bureaucracies seem prone to fixation on huge omnibus money sponge projects that "everyone can get behind" but that starve out everything else. The fact that these projects are so big tends to make them slow and not very innovative.
ITER is a mess. It's a stereotypical government program that will do little to advance fusion science and will take so long to build and be so expensive that it will be of questionable value even if they manage to finish it.
When you start comparing the $20B cost for ITER versus "big" projects like the human genome, which took $1B over a similar time scale, ITER really does seem like a boondoggle. It's sucking up massive amounts of research dollars and attention on scientific/engineering goals that don't necessarily even move in the right direction! Suppose they succeed; then what? What has been learned that can spur the next $20B? Will the next tokamok take an order of magnitude less money to produce, like the next genome did the day after the first was released?
Big projects always use ridiculous and deceptive hype, but "unlimited energy" takes that to a new level, IMHO.
But ITER is the worst possible fusion project. I mean no offence, but ITER makes nuclear reactors look cheap and small. (well, granted, the actual reactors are small, but I'm talking about the support infrastructure too)
Frankly, if ITER has the scaling laws of Tokamaks right, there won't ever be a working Tokamak smaller than a 10 story building, or producing less than about 1.5 GW. And q values can go up to maybe 10, not counting generator losses. To be honest : we don't want that.
Getting this refunded basically means that more money is going to various other fusion ideas, and that's much better than having all our eggs in one hugely expensive, massively unwieldy and "just 10 more years" project (just 10 more years for about 40 years now).
Frankly, ITER is one of those huge failed projects that just won't admit failure for mostly political reasons. We all know about lots of them. Either it will fail directly because physics somehow prevents Tokamaks from being cost effective, or it will fail because it won't succeed by the time we need it to succeed. So far, the net result of the project is that a 6 story Tokamak can't work, due to plasma instabilities. So they're building a 10 story one.
The project itself has stupendous accomplishments. It has demonstrated almost unprecedented international scientific collaboration. The amount of money freely given to fund ITER is ridiculous. The amount of companies collaborating with academics on it is in the hundreds. It has so many governments invested in it ... It has so many committees and university boards invested in it it's hard to find a decent physics department that isn't invested in it ... but all of these are political achievements. The physics side of the project is finding physics not all that cooperative.
You should think about what ITER is trying to do as a way to apply massive force to reality until it bends to our will. It's not smart at all (of course the details of doing this are very intricate. There's a difference. Smart is finding a way to beat the calculation speed of a huge datacenter with a 1990's pentium when it comes to calculating digits of pi [1]. Intricate is building a huge datacenter. Both are great accomplishments, of course).
The problem with most of the other projects are facing is that they violate "holy cows" of physics in some way. Polywell physics require a very low-pressure non-thermalized gas, which has been demonstrated but violates thermodynamics theory. It's never going to get past more than one or two physics boards. Z-pinch is one of those tricks that's just too good to be true if it works (it does work to some extent of course). Like polywells, it's a huge risk, so getting physics professors to bet their careers on it is a non-starter. Laser fusion (and other forms of inertial confinement fusion) has similar "WTF" parts that will prevent their widespread acceptance. Because most of these things have multiple projects running, in practice this is about 12 projects.
All fusion projects, with 2 exceptions (one of which is strongly suspected to be a fraud), are happening inside America, funded by either the DoD or DoE. Each of them has a much lower chance of success than ITER, I would agree with that, but if they do succeed, the payoff will be much greater. If polywells work, for example, we should be able to build a 100 megawatt or so fusion reactor the size of a 60s TV set, that could operate in a building that needn't be bigger than a big house. You know, easily small and efficient enough to install on even medium sized ships. Hell, you could probably power planes with it. None of the projects even approach the size and inefficiency of ITER (meaning 10 stories, maximum achievable q value of 10 or lower). ITER should be shelved as "not good enough" and people should go back to the cafe napkin stage.
Please have a look how frigging huge ITER is. There is no other way to put it. This thing has its own campus. It is also delayed because it is the first of its kind and also underfunded with some mismanagement on top. But
ITER alone has absorbed about as much investment as the entire Manhattan project, in inflation adjusted terms. That’s just one project to produce a prototype reactor. Fusion has been very heavily funded, to lots of hype but very little evident progress. Sometimes throwing money at a problem just isn’t the answer.
ITER is commonly cited as the most expensive science project of all time. I just don't believe a start up is on the forefront of research that even everyone involved with ITER is behind.
Scale is everything for fusion (plasma). ITER is very important, as it represents the current most likely way. (Hence the name.)
That said, it's big, design by committee, slow, meticulous, etc.
It's not a fail fast market-driven experiment.
Also, most of the money is spent on the fundamentals, planning, developing operational knowhow, basic material science and plasma vessel engineering.
All in all, it could be better, but at least ITER is actually being built. MIT's ARC is still somewhere between "secured funding for a scaled down prototype" and actually will build something. Though it's great news, that they got funding (from Eni, an Italian energy company).
When it was invented the Tokamak was talked about in similar ways - and a half-dozen more schemes after it. Only the Tokamak is still here, with the finicky details still being worked out and bigger machines necessary to bring it together.
The reason ITER is huge is because it's a lot easier to confine a big plasma then it is to confine a small one - all your path lengths mean your field strengths keep fast moving ions inside the vacuum chamber. Building compact reactors invites a whole new world of confinement problems and there's some hard limits on how much magnet you can get from materials science at the moment.
I want them to succeed but the odds are against them that they don't run into the usual crunch of balancing problems which most "otherwise stable" confinement schemes do.
One problem with ITER is that it’s only point is to demonstrate ignition. It’s completely unfeasible as an actual power plant. I’m not saying it’s not useful, but rather it has a close to 0% chance of producing a scalable power plant, whereas some of the other smaller scale operations are less likely to reach ignition, but if they do so more likely to result in a viable design at scale.
If only any of these passes the lab stage to start with engineering... ITER is the only fusion machine 10-20 years away from demonstration, in 2015, and it's too big to fail.
ITER isn’t really a source of breakthroughs in necessary materials; it didn’t develop new superconductors, hasn’t solved the fusion blanket problem, it won’t be breakeven, Stellerators already are superior in terms of containment, and ITER’a fusion vessel is still intolerant of sputtering. The delays are famously a result of so many countries vying for contracts, and the result is a high performance machine built by committee.
It doesn’t even attempt to generate “new insights” it’s just a bad, old idea at scale.
This reminds me of the talk Robert Bussard gave at Google a while back, mentioning the relative efficacy and nimbleness of fusion research programs: his own small-scale, Navy-funded, evolutionary on-the-cheap effort versus the absolutely massive, multi-billion dollar ITER project. He describes the ITER project as a gigantic "rice bowl", whose primary goal is not to discover anything but rather to give a large number of people jobs.
This is a good point, thank you for bringing it up.
I watched a talk by one of the MIT people on this, and their case is tremendously compelling. This is particularly true when you compare it to the pitfalls of the ITER project.
At some point, your megaproject is just too flawed and too out of date to make sense on its own. ITER's consumption of Tritium may do more to damage the future of fusion power than what it offers in terms of understanding of the plasma.
Sure, the newer designs are risky, but how is ITER not risky? Any decent risk analysis needs to look at things in terms of alternatives. I think ITER will give important knowledge in terms of plasma physics, I just cannot begin to fathom how that is worth the 10s of Billions and waiting 2 decades to get it.
The tragedy of megaprojects comes in the form of opportunity cost.
Personally, without drawing from rigorous empirical proof that doesn’t exit, I don’t think things like unique IEC approaches are based in fairy tales. Fusion science used to be very tribal and dogma was important. That era has largely passed. Tokamak, stellarator, ps laser, steam machine, whatever. If you can find the money to make it and do the science to show its performance, great. Everyone wants you to do that. This idea of pulling resources away is tricky to navigate, because there is finite resources spent on research and getting any one design to work takes significant effort. That’s why so much is being poured into ITER instead of other promising leads. Humans are ready to see a machine work. It’s painful to get there. It’s not my first pick on a machine. But in order to keep progress moving a real reactor needs to be made of some kind.
The idea is essentially that to get the parameters needed to make net energy with tokamaks, you need either very strong magnets or a large device. At the time of ITER's design, they used the strongest magnets they could find and then made the thing big enough to get the energy gain they wanted.
The speaker of this talk argues that it's size that stalled progress in tokamaks, since they'd become so big that building them became a massive, multinational project.
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