ITER - can someone explain why

[GenXer47]

they wouldn't just build it to function as a power plant, if it works?
$65 billion and 20 years to find out it doesn't work? Ok, sure, we had to know.
But if it does work, now you have nothing but a massive steam humidifier.
AND, they'll be using up precious tritium just practicing fusion but with no application.
It seems like a dumb choice to me. For this level of investment, you go for broke!

[Pantagruel]

1. Bigger picture

LLNL is both seeking the "ignition" AND using the facility to safely test the functionality of our nuclear armaments without having to set off underground tests.

[Effete Snob]

2. No one knows how to do that

What they got is for one tiny pellet to sustain a fusion reaction for less than a nanosecond.

The energy released by that pellet exceeded the laser energy put into it, but did not exceed the energy required to run the lasers themselves.

What "worked" was the concept of shining a bunch of powerful lasers on something and getting it to briefly sustain a fusion reaction for a very short moment.

No one knows how to turn that into any practical system for a power plant.

The ancient Greeks knew how to make a steam engine that did this:



They did not then build a railroad.

That's about where we are between the LLNL ITER and a power plant.

[GenXer47]

5. cool device!

Thanks for a Christmas present idea!

[Effete Snob]

8. Hero's Engine

There are commercial science kits of varying complexity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

An aeolipile, aeolipyle, or eolipile, from the Greek "αιολουπυλη", also known as a Hero's engine, is a simple, bladeless radial steam turbine which spins when the central water container is heated. Torque is produced by steam jets exiting the turbine. The Greek-Egyptian mathematician and engineer Hero of Alexandria described the device in the 1st century CE, and many sources give him the credit for its invention.[1][2] However, Vitruvius was the first to describe this appliance in his De architectura (ca. 30-20 BCE).[3]

The aeolipile is considered to be the first recorded steam engine or reaction steam turbine, but it is neither a practical source of power nor a direct predecessor of the type of steam engine invented during the Industrial Revolution.[4]

[cos dem]

3. It's a science experiment, not a power plant.

As a science experiment, it's meant to observe the reaction for the purpose of collecting scientific data.
A power plant would be built fundamentally differently, since the point would be to use the excess energy to heat a fluid (e.g. water) to drive turbines.

I doubt the ITER even has a boiler (though maybe it does, IDK).

I'm not even sure that we would know how to build a power plant yet.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

4. You start out assuming context and then you proceed to a massive misunderstanding

... of engineering and economics.

[GenXer47]

7. lots to unpack there but the tritium is running out anyway

https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-fusion-is-already-facing-a-fuel-crisis/

It looks like humanity will learn how to fuse tritium and deuterium just in time for the supply to run dry.
Life's a B!

[Bernardo de La Paz]

11. Interesting article. Thank you. Breeder fusion and D-Boron reactors sound very interesting

Technology for any one of them can undoubtedly be adapted for the others.

[BadgerKid]

12. Even if tritium mining on the moon works

Is there a way to bring the tritium back to Earth?

[CloudWatcher]

6. Because we're at least decades away from it being good enough to use

The current hype is way overblown. Misleading at best, intentional lying at worst.

Fusion is worth pursuing, but the reporting of this is just awful.

I've posted this before but .. fyi if you want some useful background and are willing to watch a 12 minute video:

[Effete Snob]

9. Yep

It's annoying. I had gotten the impression, as an impressionable youth, that we'd all have tokamaks in our basement by now.

[Warpy]

10. I wish it were all that simple

The two problems were in sustaining the reaction without blowing it up and then harnessing the tremendous amount of energy it produced. It sounds like they've managed to throw enough lasers into the chamber to sustain the reaction on a small enough scale that it didn't blow the facility up. They've always managed short bursts, but nothing sustained.

My best guess says water volatizes into steam a little too readily to be useful in a fusion reactor. They're going to have to figure out some other circulating substance to drive a generator, along with coming up with a tritium delivery system that will make it far less of a steamy waste of a scarce resource.

They're farther along than I thought they would be in my lifetime, actually.

Consider that a relatively small fusion reaction is enough to level an average city and most of its suburbs. Fusion is supposed to drive stars, not light bulbs. Getting it scaled down far enough is the part of the problem they seem to have solved