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February 05, 2010
Shake Up On The Way
For those of you not familiar with Latin "iter" means "the way". And the ITER Fusion program now headquartered in France is undergoing a top management shake up. In an effort to put the world's largest scientific experiment back on track after delays and cost overruns, Europe is shaking up the agency overseeing its portion of the multinational ITER reactor.It seems the shake up is due in part to unhappy customers. You know - the people putting up the money. Europe has faced increasing criticism from ITER's six other international partners: Japan, South Korea, Russia, India, China and the United States. A budget proposed last week by US president Barack Obama would slash America's funding for ITER in 2011 by 40%, to US$80 million; it cited "the slow rate of progress by the [ITER Organization] and some Members' Domestic Agencies". And on 2 February, Evgeny Velikhov, a Russian fusion researcher and head of ITER's council, called Europe a "weak link". "Unfortunately, their organizational structure is very poor," he told Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview that appeared on a Russian government website.In a recent post, Spiraling Out Of Control, I discussed some of the financial problems at ITER. And for those of you interested in the technical problems may I suggest (actually highly recommend) the Talk Polywell link at the end of that article. And let me leave you with a few words from a Polywell Fusion fan who is no fan of Tokamak designs (ITER and similar devices): Plasma Physicist and author of Principles of Plasma Physics Dr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good." And the best thing about Polywell is what Physicist Rick Nebel, who is now herding the project, has to say about it: We Will Know In Two Years or less. Cross Posted at Power and Control posted by Simon on 02.05.10 at 08:15 PM
Comments
The funny thing is that Robert Bussard - inventor of the Polywell - was, along with Robert Hirsch responsible for the US Fusion program. They had hopped that they could get 20% of the total budget for other approaches. He said so to Congress in 1995. Many years after that approach had failed. http://www.askmar.com/Robert%20Bussard/1995-6-6%20Letter%20to%20Congress.pdf Why did he back the tokamac? Because it would employ a lot of people. Just the kind of thing Congress loves to spend money on. Jobs. M. Simon · February 6, 2010 08:33 AM Sadly, lots of scientists are perfectly willing to tell lies in order to get funding. Taxpayers be damned, they want endless subsidies to play with their toys. pst314 · February 6, 2010 10:55 AM pst314, Funny thing is that with the end of construction at least 9 years away many of the scientists will have retired before getting their hands on any toys. M. Simon · February 6, 2010 12:59 PM Post a comment
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Back in the late 1970s, "Science" published a series of articles considering the potential of tokamak machines like ITER. It was obvious even then that tokamak machines would be an order of magnitude larger and more expensive than an equivalent BWR, say $B20 to $B50 rather than $B2 to $B5 for 1100 Mw. Consequently, such machines, even if successful, would have no possible commercial or military use.
Now, after almost 40 years of heavy investment, billions of dollars and the entire careers of thousands of brilliant physicist, we still stare failure in the face. Despite the outright likes of tokamak proponents, The tokamak machines are no closer to a sustained fusion reaction than they were 40 years ago, let alone any net any energy production.
Until AGW, the tokamak program was the greatest scientific and criminal fraud ever perpetrated by scientists, even greater than Lysenkoism. The USA should eliminate its support for the tokamak machine and put its money elsewhere. It should also begin criminal prosecutions of the perps involved.