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Page added on October 11, 2018
World’s largest fusion facility to see ‘light’ by 2025
ITER aims to prove that fusion power can be produced on a commercial scale. If successful, generations to come will benefit from fusion energy.
ITER aims to prove that fusion power can be produced on a commercial scale. If successful, generations to come will benefit from fusion energy.
The quest to harness fusion power for commercial energy generation has been actively researched since the 1950s. The reason it has taken so long is a combination of science and engineering challenges, Bigot said.
Construction of ITER began in this nuclear fusion facility in the southern French countryside in 2010 and there have been delays in its construction but now have largely overcome, he said.
“The ITER project is very much on track to achieve first plasma by 2025,” Bigot told this visiting IANS correspondent.
This means the reactor is able to generate a molten mass of electrically-charged gas — plasma — inside a core.
Creating controlled fusion requires a force that can overcome the repulsion between two positively charged nuclei, he said.
“Here at ITER we are doing a large-scale experiment to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy — one of the biggest challenges of our civilisation,” he said.
ITER means “the way” in latin.
Nuclear fusion, the first industrial-scale fusion reactor, if successful, will illuminate the way to produce clean, cheap, and abundant energy for millions of years. To current estimates this is estimated to happen in the second half of this century
This nuclear fusion facility is an international cooperation among the European Union, Russia, the US, Japan, China, India and South Korea, all contributing with products and expertise.
“But it is clear that fusion is not a quick fix; that would be an exaggeration. But we are clearly getting close to fusion being ready to deliver,” said Bigot. This is why we are beginning to see private investment, and it is why 35 countries are willing to invest in the ITER project,” an optimistic Bigot added.
Bigot does not view fusion to be a “panacea”; ideally, he views fusion as part of a global sustainable energy mix (in combination with renewable) in a clean energy future.
Why fusion technology has taken so long to see the light of day, he replied: “Different scientists have different predictions about the date when fusion will be available.”
“The private sector fusion companies are sometimes promising fusion electricity quite quickly — although we view most such claims with some skepticism. In the view of ITER members, most consider it feasible for fusion to be providing electricity on a commercial scale by mid-century; some are more eager and hope to construct electricity-generating fusion plants sooner than that.”
ITER, the most complex science project in human history, will use hydrogen fusion, controlled by superconducting magnets, to produce massive heat energy.
In the commercial machines that will follow, this heat will drive turbines to produce electricity.
Scientists say a pineapple-sized amount of hydrogen offers as much fusion energy as 10,000 tons of coal.
Bigot said when the scientists prove that fusion is a viable energy source, it will eventually replace burning fossil fuels, which are non-renewable and non-sustainable. “Fusion will be complementary with wind, solar, and other renewable energies.”
Safety is a very high priority for ITER.
“The physics of magnetic confinement fusion (like the ITER tokamak design) is considered to be extremely safe. There is no possibility of a meltdown-type of nuclear accident,” he said.
This tokamak, weighs as much as three and a half Eiffel towers, is a donut-shaped configuration for the containment of the plasma, which is where the reaction at temperatures hotter than the sun will take place.
ITER project had completed over 55 per cent of the “total construction work scope through first plasma”.
First plasma, scheduled for December 2025, will be the first stage of operation for ITER as a functional machine.
A multi-national 20 billion euro initiative as per 2016 estimates, Bigot said for ITER members the financial contribution to the project is 80-90 per cent in the form of components.
“India’s expertise is an investment in Indian companies. This is the strong benefit of being a recognized, reliable partner to the other ITER countries involved (China, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Russia and the US) for large-scale scientific R&D collaboration.
“This also leverages the Indian financial investment: by paying for about nine per cent of the ITER project, India receives access to 100 per cent of the intellectual property contributed by all members,” the Director-General, who assumed the post in 2015, said.
In its facility in Hazira, a port in Surat district in Gujarat, Indian contractor Larson & Toubro is manufacturing segments of the upper cylinder of the cryostat, the giant refrigerator that will house the ITER tokamak, which will produce 500 megawatts of thermal power.
The ITER’s 55 per cent milestone is getting significant attention. The progression rate is in the order of 0.7 per cent per month.
The concept of the ITER project was conceived at the 1985 Geneva Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
When the ITER Agreement was signed in 2006, it was supported by leaders like French President Jacques Chirac, US President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
A commercial fusion plant will be designed with a slightly larger plasma chamber, for 10-15 times more electrical power
35 Comments on "World’s largest fusion facility to see ‘light’ by 2025"
Stupid Humanzese on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 1:09 pm
Clean, safe , unlimited – LOL
Anontarded1 on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 1:15 pm
thank you supertards (pbuh swt) for working on this problem to save humanity. i’m tired of eurotard (pbuh swt) chopping blades wind turbines which would ultimately reconfigure climate and making them less effective. the idea that newton 3rd law is null and void when it comes to “muh winds” is absurd. supertards wind farms in tx already causing wildfires in continental US but good luck proving causation.
Anontarded1 on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 1:16 pm
even a tard humanzee knows there’s no free lunch. hey tard (pbuh swt) do you think wind energy is “clean”? thank you.
Outcast_Searcher on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 1:26 pm
Is the director general Elon Musk in disguise? (Unlimited light, indeed).
Next he’ll be telling us we can buy one for $35,000, real soon now. LOL
Cloggie on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 1:30 pm
Never say never. German Wendelstein project hopes to achieve steady state operation in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
Anontarded1 on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 1:37 pm
ok putin is launching criminal investigation into rocket disaster. so this will whitewash over “muh putin” meme. still no acceptance of responsibility over MH17.
i’m ashamed that we still going to that stupid space station. the idea that we can’t build our own station is dumb. supertards now can fly rockets and land them like planes. i’m kinda pissed that supertard elon haven’t got into making planes that can’t crash (of course nothing is perfect). but that’s a huge industry to make money off of.
Richard Guenette on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 1:54 pm
Just another techie fantasy.
dave thompson on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 3:36 pm
OH boy! Only five years.
Anonymous on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 5:34 pm
Make work project for physicists and administrators. Waste of money. Fusion…always 50 years in the future. If this were really on the horizon to cheap energy, the private sector would invest in it. Again…just a jobs program for Ph.D.s
Sissyfuss on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 6:16 pm
We need clean abundant power in a minimum of 10 years time. Nothing will scale up that fast so prepare for the bottleneck. The president who owned the Mirage at one point is now in the process of manufacturing an even glitzier version for his believers. One of clean coal and the return of manufacturing. The lizard part of my brain wants to believe.
makati1 on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 6:26 pm
2025. Then, 2030. Then 2035. Then 2040…
Tommytommywantshismommy on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 8:16 pm
Throw a few more billion into it, i’m sure you’ll figure something out.
DMyers on Thu, 11th Oct 2018 9:19 pm
Eventually, this may happen. Celebrate!
Go Speed Racer on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 1:34 am
toss in a few sofa’s, old tires, and a gallon
of kerosene, and we’ll get that sucker
to see first light a whole lot sooner.
And at least that way it will be
net-energy-positive
Anonymouse1 on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 3:09 am
ITER means “the way” in latin.
As in ‘its way’ in the future. Like a really long way. No really. Been waiting all my life, still haven’t see one watt of that planet-saving, too cheap to meter fusion electricity come out of my wall socket yet.. If you have kids, they will waiting all their lives too.
That’s’the way’ fusion research works.
Davy on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 5:38 am
well lookie there a-none1 made a real comment even if it is pretty content shallow. Like tell us something we don’t already know already, pal. It is better than your facebook crap you normally post.
pointer on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 5:43 am
2023 Headline: World’s largest fusion facility to see ‘light’ by 2030
Anonymouse1 on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 6:09 am
What a retard, go find something useful to do with your miserable, dumbass life. Like, take a bath, or, go outside, or, even better, check yourself into the nearest state mental hospital. You know, like we’ve been urging you to for years.
Davy on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 6:43 am
Back to your old facebook self, huh, a-none1. Let’s see, 2 weeks before a another real comment? You are one shallow individual.
Davy on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 6:45 am
BTW
“like we’ve been urging”
who is the “we’ve” you royal dumbass?
alain gargasson on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 6:53 am
All energies need rare earths, very polluting to produce, some 95% provided by China, which sets quotas and forces industries to relocate to have access today to rare metals. So wind turbines, laptops and others will be made in China. See what Guillaume Pitron says about the rare earth war (go to the English translation).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0anZ0wPVZCY
Antius on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 9:07 am
Slightly off topic, but still on the subject of energy.
A good example of the problems people are going to have transitioning to distributed power generation, if that proves necessary due to breakdown of traditional grid systems. Fair Isle lies between the Shetlands and the Orkneys and is not connected to the mainland UK grid. It has a permanent population of just 50 people. It presently uses a combination of wind power and diesel generators for electric power, but power is frequently unavailable. It is a good case study for distributed generation in any sort collapse scenario, because it is one of the few places in Europe today where a grid connection is unavailable and impractical to provide.
http://www.shetnews.co.uk/news/14946-fair-isle-moves-closer-to-round-the-clock-power
This new scheme will provide more reliable power using a mixture of 3 x 60kW wind turbines; a 60kW solar array and 24 hours of battery storage. The total capital cost is £2.6million (~3 million Euro), or £70,000 per resident. The system will provide a time averaged power output of ~70kW, or 1.2kW per resident.
This translates into a capital cost of £37,000 per kW of average power delivered. That is very expensive by any standard – even the financially disastrous Hinkley C nuclear power plant, for which build times and costs are at least triple what they realistically should be; is projected to generate with capital costs of £6250 per kW and unit cost of power is £100/MWh.
There are a number of possible explanations for the high costs. The system is fairly non-standard, required unique engineering and lacks scale economies, which always pushes up costs.
Feed-in tariff solar systems require perpetual subsidies even with the grid providing 100% back-up. Typical feed-in solar systems average at about £10,000 per average kW. This is costly, but nowhere near as costly as the Fair Isle system. If this is scaled up linearly to a system that produces 70kW on average, it would amount to £700,000 – still only a quarter of the cost of the Fair Isle system.
But the Fair Isle system also includes large amounts of batteries. To store 24 hours of power, some 1.68MW of battery storage is needed. Deep cycle batteries are typically available for about £150 for a 12v 100Ah battery. So buying in bulk would cost maybe £100 per kWh of storage. That would put the cost of the Fair Isle storage at £168,000 which is still less than 10% of the total project cost. Of course deep cycle batteries have an effective lifespan of about 3 years – maybe 1000 charge-discharge cycles depending upon the depth of a cycle. Maybe the cost accounts for the need to for reserve batteries, though that isn’t usually included in capital cost.
Maybe it is a combination of all of these factors – the need to systems engineer a unique system, with expensive components that lack economy of scale. I do think that the system could have been designed far more sensibly, using a combination of slew loads (heating, perhaps?) and back-up diesel to reduce total storage costs. But if this example is generally representative, it does suggest that distributed energy is a very expensive way of producing power. For Fair Island there is clearly no choice. But for any mainland place with an accessible electricity grid, it is difficult to see any practical advantage to going down this route. It would appear to be much more efficient to rely upon the grid to deliver power from huge wind farms, multi-MW utility grade solar or nuclear power plants that can generate at lower costs thanks to large scale economies. Grid transmission would appear to add relatively little to the cost.
Antius on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 9:23 am
Magnetic confinement fusion. Very complex and costly systems with poor power density.
20billion Euros for a plant that will generate 500MW of heat, which would generate maybe 200MW of electric power. And that is assuming it will actually work.
That is 100,000 Euro per kWe and that is just capital cost. Even more expensive than distributed solar energy! About 50 times the installed cost of a new PWR nuclear reactor built in China or South Korea. And operating costs would be awful as well, given that the energy that is generated must be harvested from fast neutrons which will destroy reactor components and turn just about everything exposed to them into intense gamma emitters.
As things stand, it is difficult to imagine fusion reactors doing anything that other systems cannot do better. Even renewable energy with all of its intermittency problems looks like a more practical energy source than fusion reactors do at this point in time.
Richard Guenette on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 9:25 am
Davy, you are a troll. I don’t have time to read your foolishness.
Antius on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 10:34 am
“All energies need rare earths, very polluting to produce, some 95% provided by China, which sets quotas and forces industries to relocate to have access today to rare metals.”
Alain, I think this is only partially true. Rare earth elements tend to be used to produce high field-strength permanent magnets, which make wind turbine nacelles slightly more compact and avoid the need for more complex electromagnets. This may provide a cost advantage, but I cannot see that rare earths are an absolute necessity in the production of electrical generators for wind turbines. Electromagnets using simple ferrous iron cores still have respectable field strength; they just aren’t cost optimum so long as rare earths are available. Wind turbines can be built containing literally no electrical systems whatever – just mechanical pumps that compress air or water and pump it to a centralised station. I will write more about that later.
With solar panels there is an analogous situation. The most cost effective panels are thin film gallium arsenide. Yet solar panels can be produced using amorphous silicon and a huge variety of doping agents, some rare, some very common, can be used to produce the PN junction. Again, the cells may be not be quite so efficient and may have higher resultant capital cost per peak watt. But there are a huge number of options that could be made to work, provided one is prepared to accept either higher capital costs or invest in new development costs. This would appear to be necessary in any case if renewable energy is to be scaled to a level capable of substituting fossil fuels. Ultimately, most systems need to rely on commonly available materials.
Davy on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 11:50 am
Richard, you are a Canadian sock. I don’t have time to read your foolishness.
Anontarded1 on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 12:05 pm
richardtard, why u canadains vascillate between inferior complex to hatred and supremacy against supertards america? why u attacking supertard. is that why you ally so well with muslims who cross border to attack supertards america?
Anontarded1 on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 12:11 pm
yor behavior is typical islamic, that’s why u mesh so well.
Anontarded1 on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 12:13 pm
not a word from alt-tard media on turkey releasing pastor brunson.
Anonymouse1 on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 1:04 pm
Exceptionaltard, you are an amerikan lunatic. I don’t have time to read your plagiarized cut and pastes.
Davy on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 1:57 pm
“I don’t have time to read your plagiarized cut and pastes.”
another stupid Canadian saying one thing and doing another.
Richard Guenette on Fri, 12th Oct 2018 5:11 pm
Davy, where do you get your misinformation from?
Chrome Mags on Sat, 13th Oct 2018 1:39 am
I think the Flux Capacitor has a better chance of giving us unlimited energy. Throw an aluminum can and a banana peel in into it and it generates enough surplus energy to go back or forwards in time. sarc
Go Speed Racer on Sat, 13th Oct 2018 4:52 am
But first U have to produce 1.21 Gigawatts.
One of the few ways to get that kind of
energy, is a bolt of lightning.
Don’t forget the van with terrorists in it,
who are very upset about being sold
boxfuls of old pinball machine parts,
when they paid for an atomic bomb kit.
Permavillage on Sat, 13th Oct 2018 9:19 pm
It will eventually replace burning fossil fuels, which are non-renewable and non-sustainable. “Fusion will be complementary with wind, solar, and other renewable energies.
And how are they going to handle the petrochemicals?