ZPEnergy.com - ITER Hot Fusion Reactor

In the hydrino yahoo group Chris writes: I know this is a little off topic, but BLP is about energy production, and since the ITER has been in the news today I am curious what some of the readers think about this project.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/05/26/japan.fusion.reactor.ap/index.html

If anyone is curious (like I was) about what's going on with Hot Fusion today, read these links:

http://www.iter.org
http://users.rowan.edu/~wollen91//fusionreactors.htm

Background:
ITER = International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
China, Europe, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the US are planning to build an experimental fusion reactor to the tune of $14B. It is expected to take 10 years to build, once they stop fighting over where to build it, and will probably be located in Japan or France.

After going through all the info in the ITER.ORG site, I have come to the conclusion that even if they ever get this stuff to work, it will be the most expensive energy ever produced.

The complexity of a fusion reactor is orders of magnitude higher than that of a fission reactor. A fission reactor is a very simple process: put some radioactive stuff together, add some control rods, and presto you've got heat.

Not so with a fusion reactor. 100M degree temps right along side supercooled magnets at 4K. 50MW RF generators, Alpha particle heaters, huge magnetic fields, etc. A million things to go wrong. It makes a fission plant look like Tinker Toys. Just the plumbing in the ITER plant alone is almost beyond comprehension.

The fusion guys have a joke going that it takes the power of a nuclear fission plant just to start-up a thermonuclear fusion plant. Even with a power gain of 10, unless you can keep the fusion going the costs to keep restarting it are enormous. So far it's never lasted more than 2 seconds in all the research to date. They expect to increase that to "minutes".

While many people think that fusion is clean and only produces Helium as the primary waste, they forget about the extremely high energy Neutron radiation. Basically everything near the reactor will become radioactive. 40,000 tons of radioactive metal waste per plant in the end. The projections are that it would take 25 years for the radiation to decay enough before an old plant could be dissassembled. The dissassembly would take another 10 years. So 35 years and $B in cost just to decommission a single H plant.

Nuclear fission is dead today. One one would think of building a new plant. Yet, we are spending $B on fusion R&D to make the same mistake all over again. The radioactive waste problems will be far worse. If we could not make simple fission plants work, who really believes that we can make fusion plants work?

The $14B for the ITER reactor is only for experiments. It will not produce electricity. Some say a production H plant could cost over $50B each just to build.

ITER says that this is the last chance for hot fusion. If successful results do not come from this reactor, it is likely there will not be another. If so this will be a very costly waste of both time and money that the world cannot afford. The oil clock is ticking.

Chris. (BSEE)
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From: Peter Zimmerman
Subject: Re: ITER Hot Fusion Reactor

In 1958 I met Jim Tuck, then director of the controlled (peaceful) fusion program, Project Sherwood, at Los Alamos. Jim said that he expected to have a reactor operating in 5 years.

I didn't see Tuck until 1963 when he gave a physics colloquium at Stanford. He said then that he expected to have a working reactor in 10 years.

The last time I saw Jim was at an APS meeting in LA in 1973. He then confidently predicted a working reactor in 20 years.

This series is not converging rapidly.

Jim Tuck is dead, and it's 2004, and we don't have anything approaching a fusion reactor. I conclude that the approach using electromagnetic confinement of any sort is the hardest technical problem the race has ever attempted to solve, and do not expect to see such a machine finished in my lifetime (I'm almost (but not quite) 63. Both my parents lived well into their 80s).

I might buy inertial confinement fusion as a possibility, but I won't put money up for stock in it.

Nice, clean, advanced fission plants are the way to go.

--pz