Have you considered that the programs are designed to fail or at least delay?  Tokamak work proceed very well in the 1980s and into the early 1990s when we were on the verge of breakeven.  Then the government cut the funding and such down the specific experiment that had make the most progress.  I have suspected the hand of the fossil fuel interest behind most anti-nuclear (fission and fusion) actions.  I note that while the DOE was cranking out thousand of nuclear weapons in the 1970s the lefty protestors were focused on civilian nuclear power.  It was only when Reagan made a point of confronting the Soviets that we saw a shift to protesting weapons and by that time new construction of new nuclear power plants was dead as a result of Three Mile Island.  Why couldn't fossil fuel interests have been funding and manipulating the those protest groups.

We have wasted a good 12 years on negotiatiing the terms of the ITER which will be built in France when we could have easily funded an build a similar protype reactor ourselves in this country by now.  Why not?

I'm not knocking the alternatives in the sense that we should fund them at reasonable levels to see if they have promise.  I have some concern that powerful interest really don't want this to happen regardless of the method.

I agree.  Just take a look at my earlies posts on this site and the responses that I got! This site does tend to attract people with a bias/expertise toward fission technologies.  A some point I think there must have a focus on "classic Orion" (of the Dyson-Taylor variety).  Maybe we can stir things up for fusion.

I think this is mainly do to lobbyists working for the fossil fuel interests.  They get the congress to cut funds.  It could be a coincidence of course but the timing was strange.  Perhaps they just wanted to save money.  I'm more suspicious of the vast antinuclear campaigns of the 1970s having been motivated by oil/coal interests.

We are spending a lot more on global warming research than we are on fusion.  If the CO2 based theory of grobal warming is true(which I personally doubt) then fusion could be the solution.  The only way they are getting the money is for all of the countries involved to put up part of the money.

ITER if sucessful is to demonstrate a working fusion reactor.  There is a lot of development work as well as the cost to fabricate the first machine.  I would think that a some point the cost per machine would decline since they wouldn't have as many fixed development costs.

-- Edited by John at 04:28, 2007-05-21

All I'm saying is that fission is good, but fusion is better in many aspects.

Yes, it is difficult, but perhaps it should deserve more attention then what normally goes into it. NASA did a paper with a hypothetical fusion-powered spaceship.

Would it be worth to put in notable events in fusion research into nuclearspace?

EDIT:

This site does tend to attract people with a bias/expertise toward fission technologies.

Nuclear engineers are not immune to paladrigms, plus they know a bit more about how difficult it is to archive fusion a bit more then the laymen like me.

The cliche: "...the Devil is in the details..." is fact when it comes to magnetically confined plasma's.

Perhaps the solution may not be in magnetically confined plasmas.

The capital outlays for these machines has been climbing approximately by a factor of 5-10 per decade--which means ITER should be approaching $5-10 billion dollars. The next machine, twenty years from now may approach $25-100 billion. This seems to be about the right scaling...

And you may see why I do have little faith in ITER?

I agree that the cost per machine would eventually drop: although here in the United States, when it comes to nuclear fission power, we seem to be a lot more interested in redesigning the wheel and building the things from scratch--which only serves to inflate the costs by 5-10 times. If the US adopted the same construction philosophy that the French have--I think it is called a Cookie Cutter Approach--in that they have two or three proven designs, and then just build copies, the development costs would be amortized over many plants.

Isn't that the way it is SUPPOSED to work? Redesigning the wheel every time seems terribly stupid to me. Not that improvements are bad, but when you build a power plant, economics is key. And economics do not favour always starting from the ground up.

I am all for fusion research, but we also need to put money into the things which are known to work, and are working now. In other words, we need the energy now.

To fission? Yeah, true. I recall most critismism of nuclear power has been solved, especially regarding safety. I heard that pebble bed reactors are impossible to meltdown.

-- Edited by Andrew at 17:57, 2007-05-21

EDIT:

Perhaps I should explain my position a bit more?

ITER is the grand plan. So was it for the last half of the centuary. It has produced succeses, but did it produce its promise? Nope. They are still at the problem of archiving breakeven.

A few comments from fusor.net

In doing this we join billions of others since 1950 who were waiting, but are now passed away. A new cadre of hopefuls queue up at the sidelines of fusion waiting for the promised breakthrough.

>Can it really be that such a huge project will turn out to be a complete white elephant?

A better analogy would be the white whale. The Tokamar design is none other than Moby dick being pursued by the politicians playing the role of Captain Ahab.

And my favourate:

The idea that if you keep scaling things up, at some point thermonuclear fusion becomes practical has merit. If you have a sphere of roughly one solar mass of hydrogen, you do have a practical energy source.

Rod

What I am saying, that there were succeses in other experiments of fusion. Some even archived better in certain regards then the tokamak.

So maybe, just maybe, the tokamak is flawed.

It isn't some random forum members opinions that I base off myself. I am also not totally convinced. What convinces me is:

People are building fusion reactors in their basements and garages!

-- Edited by Andrew at 18:50, 2007-05-21

EDIT:

Let me give another addative.

I am a layman, and thus I do not understand the details. What I do understand that there is an ignored alternative approach that does work, so well that people can do it at home. Yet big money goes into an approach that has been tried and tried again, resulting not in what it has promised.

I do not claim that IEC fusion, that the Farnsworth-Hinch fusor is the only possible way to go.

What I claim, is that this approach may be more productive then what the Tokamaks rapidly failed over the years. Billions of dollars worth of money has been poured into it worldwide, yet there is still nothing. Right now, the thing is stupendisly large, beyond any hope to be economical and it "might" archive breakeven with D-T, from which only the Promeathean cycle can gain any energy, which is ineffective overall.


-- Edited by Andrew at 19:17, 2007-05-21

Please remember that the reason why the US initially dropped out of the ITER project, was because it was originally much bigger and much more expensive, than the current concept.

With the considerable downsizing of ITER, the US decided to get back in.

Personally, I still think its a waste of time & money, at least until there is advancement in the field of superconducting magnet materials, to the point where their operating temperature is in excess of ~500 K (not likely to be any time soon....).
Until that happens, I'm afraid we're just engaging in massive make-work projects for physicists.

Of course the other alternative is advancement in socio-political conditions, allowing the deployment of 'contained' rather than 'controlled' fusion -- technology that has been around for decades, but rejected ostensibly for reasons of NPT non-compliance.

Fusion doesn't get funding because most people are fed up with it. They have been promised fusion power since the 1950's and 1960's. With the tokamak. Where is it now? Pretty much still scaling up. Has the design of the machine been modified since its original Soviet idea? Was it a Red Herring? Because the Soviets did this kind of thing frequently back in the cold war.

And what about improvements, or alternatives? Any? Or has the tokamaks been contiously scaled up?

Remember that the USA has spent 18 billion dollars on tokamaks already. That is allot of money.

If it is a complete failure that will probably end that approach. It tend to think that it is more likely that certain parties are afraid that it will work.

Or allow it at all because it is bound to fail.
And most people would think that the physcicist in question wouldn't take over a half a centuary and tens of billions of dollars (or equilent) amount of money to recognise that what they are working on will not work.

Global Warming gets allot of money because it is politically very active. With Al Gore's indie little film of half-assed science, it has received even more interest. Even a cult. Just question the validity of global warming and thou shall be deemed a heretic. Even if you are a geologist or meteorogist.

Fusion? The typical reaction comes from the tokamaks. "My great-great-great grandchildren will see it".

Migma archived a highest level of fusion at record, before JET. At a fraction of the cost JET needed.

Dr.Bussard said in his video on Polywell, that the idea of "magnetic confinement" is misleading because it only prevents the plasma from touching the wall, and not actually forces the atoms together. From the pictures I've seen of the plasma, I think that is true.

And superconductors with that high temperature is indeed necessary. Otherwise they will quickly lose superconductivity, and be unable to contain the plasma.

-- Edited by Andrew at 19:07, 2007-05-23

-- Edited by Andrew at 19:11, 2007-05-23

-- Edited by Andrew at 19:11, 2007-05-23

I was reading the other day that JET has reached a Q=.65 and the goal of Q=10 would be required for a workable reactor.  Considering where we were in say 1975 it seems to me that is a lot of progress.  I don't know where you get $18 billion for tokamaks?  Perhaps that's been the total world fusion investment todate?  Even if right it is worth it. 

We can pursue the electostatic concepts as plan B for a limited budget.  Bussard says he need $200 million.  I think with all of the billions we could come up with that too.  I'm not against playing around with muon fusion and laser fusion as well.  I also would like to explore breeder reactors as a fall back just in case fusion doesn't work out. 

I don't think that it would take 50 years to get a working tokamak reactor if the U.S. make it a national commitment goal like Project Apollo in the 1960s.   The 50 year plan is screw about as usual.

I don't see anything related to Apollo, but Americans love to compare their next project to Apollo. Apollo was a challenge to the Soviet's space superiority, what the game was all about back then. It was also a demonstration of USA's wealth and a distraction for the Soviets.

Apollo wasn't done for science, at least not primary. It was a massive show for the world. The fact that the first thing unpacked was the TV camera is evidence to this.

My point is, that there was ample motivation behind Apollo.
Behind fusion, there is only allot of pessimism, with occasional patterns of hopeful dreaming (well, from my standpoint anyway).

I do not believe in the tokamak machines, but if they work so well, they might as well have a try. But the thing is, that is the only machine that has received any support. Any other attempt or method has been ruthlessly discredited or unsupported.

Policy regarding fusion research has to change. These other projects, not just Dr.Bussard's deserve attention. And look at this cold fusion idea. I haven't got the science paper (I can't pay to Nature) but if it published in Nature, then there must be some validity behind it.

X-rays and similar phenomenons were also found at first impossible and unexplainable. But it worked, it existed and it was even used. The situation is the same: we do not know what is really happening, but we know how to produce it and what it does.

We have tried a lot of other concepts before the tokamak.  There was the mirror machine, the stellerator, theta pinch, etc.  The tokamak has shown the most promise.  The has also been a lot of work at the government labs on laser fusion.  What I proposing is that its time to go beyond mere lab devices and build the first working fusion reactor based on the tokamak research we now have.  I don't know of any other approach that is so far along.  This effort hasn't failed it just hasn't been seriously tried before ITER and that is slow moving given all of the international coordination issues and the limited funding.

As for as biofuels, wind, solar etc.  They are being developed by private corporations with government support incling tax incentives.  I have my doubts if they will solve the energy problem but they will help out.  

It would be interesting if in fact the laws of nature are so fickle as to be able to get to a Q of .65 but not far enough to make a usable reactor.  If the ITER people are backing off it may well be because the politicans didn't give them enough support to complete the project as originally conceived.  That's were my analogy with Apollo plays into this.  There we had a total commitment strategy to achieve the goal.  Not let's go to the moon but your total budget is $5 billion.  Of course the technologies are totally different but the attitude is what counts.  If the laws of nature don't allow then it won't happen but the success track suggests to me that it is not the case and in fact the U.S. government seems to be determined that it fail.  And, that no one else gets it either so it parcipipates only if the project is scaled by back then guess what it don't achieve the goal.

What surprises me is that no other major country has decided to "take the bull by the horns" and just do it themselves.  I would think that Japan would be capable of this for example and their energy situation is a lot worse than ours.  China may be able to do this as well or in a few years.  Of course there is also something about non-European cultures (the U.S. is basically European-type culture) and that is a surprising lack of ability at fundamental inventions.  Now once they get the idea the can copy it, evolve it, and improve it.  But what to they invent?  Take the Iranians for example.  They are still struggling to make their first fission bomb.  The U.S./European team did it in four years and developed much of basic science as well as the required technologies.  Iran has had a lot of money and the advantages of western educations and they will probably get the bomb in a year or two now.  Twenty years?   This is just copying.

One reason the oil companies have now embraced biofuels is that it is a way to continue the current internal combusion engine vehicles.  If a successful electric car is developed then they are in real trouble.

-- Edited by John at 12:20, 2007-05-25

We have tried a lot of other concepts before the tokamak. There was the mirror machine, the stellerator, theta pinch, etc. The tokamak has shown the most promise.

Back in the 60's, yeah. Migma (just as an example) archived very high level of fusion at the quarter of the cost of JET. So did fusors for a time. JET is an unscaled tokamak with superconductors I recall. I wonder what would happen to Migma or the Farnsworth fusor if it was given just as much funding and technology. Instead, tokamaks receive the only attention, with the pricetag of billion dollars. That ain't no lunch money.

A very large superconducting magnet can turn itself into an electromechanical bomb!

Remind me to leave that out when encouraging support for these things.

hat's were my analogy with Apollo plays into this. There we had a total commitment strategy to achieve the goal. Not let's go to the moon but your total budget is $5 billion. Of course the technologies are totally different but the attitude is what counts.

The problems involved are too, totally different! Rockets worked! Just ask those bombarded with V-2s in London, or one of the Soviet cosmonauths.

What they needed to do is build a big enough rocket that could get to Luna, and allow it to carry enough supplies so that you can land a few people and bring them back.

Making controlled, breakeven fusion is a totally different matter!

If the laws of nature don't allow then it won't happen but the success track suggests to me that it is not the case and in fact the U.S. government seems to be determined that it fail. And, that no one else gets it either so it participates only if the project is scaled by back then guess what it don't achieve the goal.

I presume that the fact that the USA has already spent billions of dollars on these things is irreverent.

One reason the oil companies have now embraced biofuels is that it is a way to continue the current internal combusion engine vehicles. If a successful electric car is developed then they are in real trouble.

Only if they will be obviously superior to IC motors. That may not be. And remember, oil will never fully disappear. If for nothing else, we get various chemicals out of oil. Also, jet engines require kerosene.

If a successful electric vehicle is developed they will still be in business, because of aviation and truck transportation.

There were electric vehicles developed. The batteries just weren't good. They needed the recharge time of 40 minutes to 16 hours. EEStor made a claim that they made a supercapacitator that recharges under five minutes and has enough energy to move a car efficiently.

The main problem with electric cars is energy storage.

The main issue there is to make the coils. Standard cement roads are quite expensive and frequently have to be serviced. Adding electric coils will raise the costs.

Here is a quote of Dr.Bussard criticizing Magnetic confinement.

Magnetic confinement fusion is a misnomer, as magnetic fields can NOT confine a plasma, only constrain its motion towards walls. The entire history of the MagConf program has been to reduce transport to neo-classical (not turbulent or instability-driven) losses. And THEN the machines are all inherently and inevitably huge and cost too much and make too much power to ever be economically useful --- as the utilities have been telling the AEC/DoE for 30 years. No matter, the global tokamak program provides jobs for hudreds of thousands of people in many countries, and is a safe place to put political pork funding, simply because it IS NO THREAT TO OIL - it won't ever work, but it sounds good to the untutored public.

I disagree.

That taxpayer money that is wasted on a concept that even its own supporters have sincere doubts that it will work AND be economical. I'm not saying that it should be disbanded altogether, but 16 billion is not pocket money even for the USA. Too many people base their entire carrier on this concept alone, and since they get their money from it and its the only thing they can work on, they are incapable of seeing past it.

Like the Swiss incapable of seeing the possibilities of an electric watch as opposed to the mechanical watch. End result? The Swiss losing the watch market, giving it to the Japanese. The Swiss watches are now only a luxury item, as opposed to the everyday item they were back in their golden years.

And "rising tide raises all boats" doesn't apply here, because there is no tide raised, just a boat. A single, oversized boat that is incapable of anything else but giving allot of neutrons that "might" give us break even. If we are lucky. If we pour enough billion dollars in it like madman, we might make a power plant that create power at double the price fission gives, giving very few significant advantages over it.

What I do agree with, is that policy HAS to change. The USA's current policy to not give any fusion funding except magnetic confinement and inertial confinement by lasers. The former being obviously meant for experimental purposes, the latter failing for the last 30 years.

Polywell, for example, is instead a bizarre particle accelerator where the energy required for nuclei to fuse is given by velocity and the plasma is confined by electromagnetic force given by electrons themselves (the only thing directly confined) which is fairy easy because electrons have little mass.

It is certainly easier then slowly heating everything up and hoping that by preventing the nuclei from hitting the wall by overly strong magnetic fields given by 100 kelvin superconductors that are next to 500 Kelvin molten lithium (during operation), and pray that the nuclei hit each other enough to make practical fusion. The concept may have given past successes and is fairly simple, but its problems are obvious and it is doubtful that the thing could give practical energy.

And how many billions is the ITER project holding? 3-4? Jet? 1-2 billion? And these are experimental reactors, what will the full power plant cost, actually meant to give power? Sure, the price will drop after several will be built with the cookie cutter approach, but by that time, fission reactors will be much cheaper.

There is enough uranium to last a thousand years. Nobody will want to buy a power plant with over a billion dollar price tag, while there are fission power plants that can give much, much more energy for the same price. Only two features makes fusion better against fission with the tokamaks, shorter-lived radioactive waste and you can't make bombs out of the fuels. The first one being mute, as when you get a nuclear reactor, there has to be at least one place in your country where you can safely store waste for enough time to be not your problem. The second also being mute, because if you can afford a fusion reactor worth of billions of dollars, (that requires a fission plant to jump-start it anyway) the country in question most likely already has nuclear weapons.

Despite what you may thing, the USA administration pretty much had enough of this white whale. They already spent billions of dollars on the tokamaks and researches in the field who base their entire carrier on these, assure that the tokamak is the only viable path. Image being in a politician's shoe: there are these scientist that want billions of dollars of funding for a project that a quick reference will tell that they already spent billions of dollars on. You find alternative approaches mentioned, but the scientist assure you that they will not work, and only the billion dollar projects will. When? Half a century later. You can spend the same money on a bunch of other things, like fourth or even hypothetical fifth generation fission power plants actually being built.

Billions of dollars is not lunch money even for the USA government. Lefties would rather persue renewables such as solar cells and wind farms, righties would rather build fourth generation fission power plants (or finding ways to make oil less pollutive, or something like that).
The "its worth it" talk will not work, because it is worth it for a politician if you can build something useful NOW, not half a century later with a very relaxed timeline.

And the idea that "we will do it like Apollo" isn't valid either, because Apollo was a question of prestige and national safety.
There were numerous problems that had to be overcome, but these were different engineering problems and not predicting the exact fluctuations of plasma and putting 100 kelvin superconductors next to 500 kelvin molten lithium.
They also had people that knew how to build rockets: without Werner Von Braun, the Apollo project would have failed. Werner Von Braun had allot of experience with rockets already. These rockets worked, just ask anyone who was in London while they were bombed by them. He had many innovative ideas as well, some of which he could actually try out.
Furthermore, most people think of Sputnik as the first satellite. What people thought back then, was that the Soviets have demonstrated technology that would allow them to deliver a nuke to the USA quickly and without a bomber. This may sound silly now, but within military there is always a system of subtle massages always delivered between each other. Announcing that you will build advanced anti-aircraft systems throughout your country gives the opposing country who has a big air force, to lay down.

Now image what Sputnik was back then.

Let me help: "We can nuke your country to smithereens by our rocket-delivered nukes."

The science was an excuse, not the reason. The reason behind the Apollo project was to show the Soviets that the USA will quickly catch up and nullify the treat given by the Soviets. A demonstrations of American might before the world, and a "stay down boy" massage to the Soviets.

Fusion?

"My great-great-great grandchildren will see it between being chased by the penguins from the South Pole."

There is no political support, and if you analyse the situation, there is no surprise.

Polywell would take 200-250 million WITH TEST REACTOR AND RESEARCH. There are numerous other approaches that would require similar funding, and show promising ideas and concepts. For the USA, 200-250 million is fairly cheap, especially with the promised payoff.

Laser fusion - the safe, clean way to produce nuclear energy

The Guardian, 30 May 2007

James Randerson Science correspondent

A multinational project led by British researchers aims to use a high-power laser to reproduce the physical reaction that occurs at the heart of the sun and every other star in the universe - nuclear fusion. If the project succeeds it has the potential to solve the world energy crisis without destroying the environment.

The scientists admit that a commercial reactor is a long way off, but they believe the laser approach to producing fusion shows great promise. The EU is considering a proposal to fund the set-up costs for a seven-year research project called HiPER - high powered laser energy research - that would build a working demonstration reactor. Preparing for the seven-year project alone, which is a collaboration of 11 nations, is expected to cost over euros 50m (pounds 34m). Actually building the reactor itself will cost over half a billion euros. [quite a bargain, compared to ITER !]

The British-led project, which has been earmarked by the EU as a priority, is designed to leapfrog an American-funded project called the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in Livermore, California. When that is built in 2010, physicists are confident that the Nif laser will be powerful enough to start a fusion reaction. Experiments in the Nevada desert in the 1980s with underground explosions of nuclear weapons have already shown how much energy they will need to deliver with the laser. Mike Dunne, director of the Central Laser Facility at a publicly funded research site in Oxfordshire that houses Vulcan, the most powerful laser in the world, said: "The world is going to take notice when this happens. Politicians are going to look around and say, 'So what are you going to do about it? What's the next step?'. This is how to take it from a scientific demonstration to a commercial reality."

Prof Dunne said that many of the details of the nuclear tests were still classified, "but the only thing that matters to us as a bunch of energy scientists is that it does work. The trick now is, can we get it to work without throwing a nuclear bomb at the thing?" That is what Nif is designed to do.

Achieving fusion on Earth in a way that will release useable energy has long been an aspiration of physicists.

The idea is to fuse two atoms of hydrogen to form helium. The reaction that powers the sun releases large amounts of energy because it turns Einstein's famous E=mc[squared] equation on its head. A small amount of mass is lost when the hydrogen atoms combine, in the process releasing vast quantities of energy.

Unlike nuclear fission, only low-level radioactive material, no more dangerous than hospital waste, is left over afterwards. And best of all, a runaway chain reaction like the one that caused the Chernobyl meltdown is simply impossible. The fusion dream is already being pursued by a euros 10bn project called Iter - international thermonuclear experimental reactor - which is being built in Cadarache, France. This project aims to use powerful magnets to fuse the hydrogen atoms. But many in the laser research community see their approach of bombarding hydrogen with a high energy laser as the more promising route.

"The beauty of the laser approach is that you can divide and conquer," said Prof Dunne. There are formidable engineering challenges in building a high enough power laser, increasing its firing rate and designing the millimetre sized fuel pellets, but these can all be pursued in parallel, he said.

Others are more sceptical about the laser approach. Duarte Borba, who works at Jet, an experimental magnetic fusion reactor, said achieving ignition was not the be-all and end-all. "There is a long process still ahead before you can actually build a reactor based on laser fusion," he said. [....someone once said that ICF is the quickest & cheapest way to show that fusion power is not practical for commercial power generation :O) ]