I have blogged about nuclear fusion projects in the past. There is an old joke that it will take forty year to create a nuclear fusion reactor that produces more power than it consumes. The joke part is that this has been true for fifty years. Generating controlled and sustained thermonuclear fusion has proven to be a very difficult task. Billions of dollars have been poured into research because the payoff would be an efficient and non-polluting source of electricity with a virtually infinite supply of fuel in the form of deuterium and tritium which could be extracted from seawater.
There have been many failed research projects over the decades that tried to achieve a sustainable fusion reaction that would produce more power than it consumed to operate. The big project these days is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) based on the tokomak design being built in France.
Back in the late 1970s, Russia and the U.S. decided to work together on developing a practical fusion generator. The ITER project was born in 1988 but it took until 2006 to finalize the international agreement and provide funding. There are seven members of the ITER project including the European Union, India, Japan, People's Republic of China, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The European Union is hosting the project and its contribution is about forty five percent. The other members of the project are contributing about nine percent each.
It was anticipated that the project would take ten years to construct and that it would operate for twenty years. If it is successfully completed and operated, a prototype DEMO power reactor will be build based on the knowledge gained from ITER. The original estimated cost of the project was about eleven billion dollars. With the rising cost of materials and construction along with changes to the design, the cost is now estimated to be about twenty billion dollars. The ten year construction period was supposed end in 2019. As of 2013, the estimate for completion of the project was 2027.
An ITER Management Assessment Report was summarized in a New Yorker magazine article in early 2014. Some of the eleven recommendations were to "Create a Project Culture", "Instill a Nuclear Safety Culture", "Develop a realistic ITER Project Schedule" and "Simplify and Reduce the IO Bureaucracy". The fact that such things are being suggested so far into the project indicates that there are many existing problems interfering with the advancement of the project.
The U.S. Senate published a report in July of 2014 that directed the Department of Energy to work with the State Department to withdraw from the project. The energy field is so turbulent these days that it is impossible to predict what the best energy generation system will be in ten years let alone thirty years. It is possible that ITER will never be completed.
ITER logo:
