Nuclear Fusion 25 - It Is Time To Abandon the ITER Nuclear Fusion Project
ITER is a huge international collaboration in nuclear fusion research. It is intended to be the biggest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment ever conducted. It is being built at the Cardarache facility in south France. The object of the experiment is to get the fusion reactor to produce five hundred megawatts of energy for a few seconds with an input of only fifty megawatts. Actually producing more power than consumed has not been demonstrated in any fusion reactor built so far.
There are seven entities involved in ITER; the European Union, India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The EU is providing around forty five percent of the funding with nine percent being provided by each of the other participants.
The project was launched in 2006. Actual construction of ITER began in 2013 with an original estimate of about five billion dollars. ITER has been continually plagued by a number of problems including coordinating all the different countries that are involved in providing components for the reactor and management of such a huge complex project. These problems have repeatedly pushed the cost up and delayed completion of the project.
As of 2015, the estimate cost of ITER tripled to over fourteen billion. At that time , ITER was projected to be completed by 2019 with initial experiments scheduled for 2020. Full operational fusion experiments were to be conducted in 2027.
Now, in 2016, the latest schedule provided by the director of the project says that the reactor will be switched on by 2025. The final operational testing for successful fusion generation of energy is now scheduled for 2035. So, in one year, the schedule has slipped eight years. The new budge for the project called for another five billion dollars which represents an increase in estimated costs of about thirty percent in a single year. A panel of nuclear experts was called together to review these changes of schedule and expansion of budget. The panel accepted the new schedule as "plausible" but said that the additional funding would probably not be available.
The U.S. Department of Energy is releasing a report this week on their position on the future of U.S. participation in the ITED project. The U.S. Senate has voted several times to cancel U.S. funding for ITER but the U.S. House of Representatives has killed those bills. The governing council of ITER will meet this June to debate what will happen to the whole ITER project.
While ITER has been having all these difficulties, in the U.S. alone, there are a number of companies that are busy developing nuclear fusion power reactors. A lot of different designs are being explored. One thing they have in common is the fact that all of the new fusion reactors been considered are far cheaper and smaller than ITER. They are also expecting to produce commercial models long before ITER is expected to even be operational. Considering that huge sums of money are being spent just to test the principle of nuclear fusion at ITER while these U.S. companies hope to have build actual working fusion power reactors in the same time frame strongly suggests that ITER has outlived its usefulness and should be abandoned.
Model cross section of ITER with human figure for scale:
