Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Felix; The 2025 planned date to create a plasma has been set back for “months, even years”.
International nuclear fusion project may be delayed by years, its head admits
Facility in France still far from being able to show feasibility of generating carbon-free energy despite recent breakthrough in US
AFP in Saint-Paul-Les-Durance
Sat 7 Jan 2023 05.35 AEDT…
Iter’s previously stated goal was to create the plasma by 2025.
But that deadline will have to be postponed, Pietro Barabaschi – who in September became the project’s director general – told Agence France-Presse during a visit to the facility.
The date “wasn’t realistic in the first place”, even before two major problems surfaced, Barabaschi said.
One problem, he said, was wrong sizes for the joints of blocks to be welded together for the installation’s 19 metres by 11 metres (62ft by 36ft) chamber.
The second was traces of corrosion in a thermal shield designed to protect the outside world from the enormous heat created during nuclear fusion.
Fixing the problems “is not a question of weeks, but months, even years”, Barabaschi said.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jan/06/french-nuclear-fusion-project-may-be-delayed-by-years-its-head-admits
A lot of green advocates have talked up fusion as a short to medium term replacement for coal. For example, the Biden administration recently announced a goal of fusion by 2032. Former British PM Boris Johnson announced in 2019 scientists in Oxford were “on the verge of creating commercially viable miniature fusion reactors for sale around the world”.
In the light of this ITER fail, perhaps greens will need to keep the coal plants around a bit longer than they anticipated.
That was NOT the aim of the project. When this was started in 1985, no one was looking for “carbon free” anything. That BS was added by AFP
The envirofascists will strongly support nuclear fusion right up until it actually becomes a feasible way of running our modern world and then we will see an about turn.
Yet another unicorn.
It’s just another govt mega project which has been going nowhere for a long time.
NASA was also going nowhere before they started to allow the private sector into space launches with some new ides.
Has there been any technology developed in the modern scientific era (say, since 1800) that has taken longer than 40 years from conception to market introduction that was commercially successful? Forty years is about the working life of a scientist engineer and is about the longest duration of debt instruments that could be used to fund R&D.
Some examples:
airplane: late 1890s – 1920s
transistor: late 1940s – 1950s
television: late 1920s – late 1940s
solid state computer: early 1950s – late 1950s
nuclear fission power plant: late 1930s – 1960s
The only exception I can think of was the liquid fueled rocket which was developed in the 1920s with the first successful “commercial” rocket being the Ariane of the late 1970s. However, the liquid fueled rocket was developed for scientific and later military purposes so governments were almost the exclusive customers, with private users adapting them for commercial use, mainly communication satellites.
Magnetic confinement fusion has been in development since the 1950s; Inertial confinement since the 1970s.
It’s likely that the ITER will be successful in its technological goals but the technology will be too expensive and difficult to use for a commercial application. Might find a use for space propulsion.
A successful fusion power plant will likely use an approach that has only recently be considered or is yet to be proposed.