Preface. Fusion is the only possible energy resource that could replace fossil fuels according to Martin Hoffert, et al in the 2002 Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet, Science.

I’m not so sure fusion can replace fossil fuels. In “When Trucks Stop Running”, I explain why heavy-duty trucks can’t be electrified or run on anything else. Manufacturing consumes over half of fossils, and in “Life After Fossil Fuels”, I explain why manufacturing can’t be electrified or run on anything else either. And with peak oil having happened in 2018, we’re out of time and energy. Nor would fusion be able to make the 500,000 products that use fossil fuels as feedstock, the natural gas based fertilizer that feeds 4 billion of us and more.

2023 Update. World’s Biggest Nuclear-Fusion Project Faces Delays as Component Cracks. Bloomberg

Initially ITER was to cost $5 billion, was raised to $23 billion, and now will be even higher due to cracks along cooling pipes of the thermal shield, lined with 5 tons of pure silver to contain heat 10 times hotter than the sun. The vacuum vessel sectors, each weighing the equivalent of 300 cars and as tall as a telephone pole, show slight differences in manufacturing that complicates the welding process used to put them together. More than 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) of pipe will need to be ripped out and reassembled on site, with engineers forced to figure out new ways of putting together the dizzyingly complex reactor. More than a million individual pieces have been commissioned to go into the project, which ITER figured was close to 70% complete before the defects were discovered.

ITER Director-General Barabaschi warned members the project faces problems that are potentially “extensive,” along with new requirements for time and money that “will not be insignificant.” The project has already been delayed by disruptions from the pandemic and Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine with added complications due to critical components made in Russia.

The additional cost and time delay have yet to be calculated

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Jassby D (2018) ITER is a showcase … for the drawbacks of fusion energy. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

[ This is a really good, comprehensive article about fusion and I’ve only put a small part of it below. ]

ITER is expensive – the total weight is 400,000 tons: 340,000 for the foundations and buildings, and 23,000 tons for the tokamak.  That’s a huge capital and energy outlay, constructed using fossil fuels.  How can ITER ever repay that energy back? Clearly it can’t.

Next to the facility is a 10-acre electrical switchyard with massive substations handling up to 600 megawatts of electricity, or MW(e), from the regional electric grid, which is enough to supply a medium-sized city. This power will be needed as input to supply ITER’s operating needs; no power will ever flow outward, because ITER’s internal construction makes it impossible to convert fusion heat to electricity. Remember that ITER is a test facility designed purely to show proof of concept as to how engineers can mimic the inner workings of the sun to join atoms together in the real world in a controlled manner; ITER is not intended to generate electricity.

The electrical substation hints at the vast amount of energy that will be expended in operating the ITER project—and indeed every large fusion facility. As pointed out in my previous Bulletin story, fusion reactors and experimental facilities must accommodate two classes of electric power drain: First, a host of essential auxiliary systems such as cryostats, vacuum pumps, and building heating, ventilation and cooling must be maintained continuously, even when the fusion plasma is dormant.

The second category of power drain revolves directly around the plasma itself, whose operation is in pulses. For ITER, at least 300 MW(e) will be required for tens of seconds to heat the reacting plasma and establish the requisite plasma currents. During the 400-second operating phase, about 200 MW(e) will be needed to maintain the fusion burn and control the plasma’s stability.

Tokamak fusion systems also require an unceasing hundreds of megawatts of electric power just to keep them going.

Radiation and radioactive waste from fusion. As noted earlier, ITER’s anticipated 500 MW of thermal fusion power is notelectric power. But what fusion proponents are loathe to tell you is that this fusion power is not some benign solar-like radiation but consists primarily (80 percent) of streams of energetic neutrons whose only apparent function in ITER is to produce 30,000 tons of radioactive waste as they bombard the walls of the reactor vessel and its associated components.

Surrounding the ITER tokamak, a monstrous concrete cylinder 3.5 meters thick, 30 meters in diameter and 30 meters tall called the bioshield will prevent X-rays, gamma rays and stray neutrons from reaching the outside world. The reactor vessel and non-structural components both inside the vessel and beyond up to the bioshield will become highly radioactive by activation from the neutron streams. Downtimes for maintenance and repair will be prolonged because all maintenance must be performed by remote handling equipment.

For the much smaller Joint European Torus experimental project in the United Kingdom, the radioactive waste volume is estimated at 3,000 cubic meters, and the decommissioning cost will exceed $300 million, according to the Financial Times.

Water world. Torrential water flows will be needed to remove heat from ITER’s reactor vessel, plasma heating systems, tokamak electrical systems, cryogenic refrigerators, and magnet power supplies.  Operation of any large fusion facility such as ITER is possible only in a location such as the Cadarache region of France, where there is access to many high-power electric grids as well as a high-throughput cool water system.

Daniel Clery, et al. May 6, 2016. More delays for ITER, as partners balk at costs. Science 352: 636-637

It wasn’t the pat on the back that ITER officials were looking for. Last week, an independent review committee delivered a report that was supposed to confirm that ITER, the troubled international fusion experiment under construction in Cadarache, France, finally has come up with a reliable construction schedule and cost estimate. But the report says only that the new date for first operations—2025, 5 years later than the previous official target—is the earliest possible date and could slip.

And it underscores the challenge of ITER’s ballooning budget. To start running by 2025, ITER managers have asked for an extra €4.6 billion, which they are unlikely to receive. As a result, the report says, ITER’s ultimate goal—producing a “burning plasma” reaction of deuterium and tritium nuclei that sustains itself mostly with its own heat—will be delayed from 2032 until 2035 at the earliest.

ITER officials say the report confirms that the project is finally on the right track. “There is now a credible estimate of the schedule and cost envelope with respect to the financial capabilities of all the members,” says ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot. “All the pieces are in place to make a decision” on enacting the plan. But others say that the new schedule is implausibly optimistic. “It’s all fiction,” says one expert who requested anonymity to protect his connections to the project. “As the report very carefully lays out, there are umpteen assumptions that aren’t going to happen.

Dreamed up in the 1980s, ITER aims to show that deriving energy from nuclear fusion is feasible. Specifically, it aims to produce a burning plasma, trapped in an intense magnetic field, that will generate 10 times more energy than it consumes. In France, the project site is finally taking shape, as workers erect the massive facility’s buildings and install the first components shipped from member states. About 40% of the work needed for first operations is done.

But delays and cost overruns have plagued ITER from the beginning. When the project partners—China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States—signed the construction agreement in 2006, ITER was supposed to be finished om 2016 for about $11 billion. The actual cost, impossible to calculate exactly because members contribute mostly parts rather than cash and use different accounting systems, could be three times as high.

ITER’s woes stem from two sources, experts say. First, its design was far from complete when the agreement was signed. In fact, the report says, it’s still not complete.

Second, the ITER agreement established a weak central organization with little power to direct the project. Those management deficiencies were laid bare in a February 2014 review that called for 11 reforms, including the appointment of a new director-general and the completion of a realistic “baseline” construction schedule and cost estimate. Last November the ITER organization presented that new baseline—called the updated long-term schedule (ULTS)—to the ITER Council of representatives from the member states, and the council requested the independent review. The ULTS itself has never been made public, researchers say, but the panel report gives the bottom line.

The 14-member review panel, headed by Albrecht Wagner, former chief of the DESY particle physics lab in Hamburg, Germany, praised Bigot, a French nuclear physicist with extensive management experience in industry and government, for greatly improving ITER’s management. The changes have “led to a substantial improvement in project performance, a high degree of motivation, and considerable progress during the past 12 months,” the report says.

However, the report also suggests that the new schedule falls short of providing a true, reliable baseline. “[T]his is a success-oriented schedule with no contingency,” the report says. “If any of the major risks that the [ITER organization] has identified materializes, then the [first plasma] date will almost certainly slip by some degree.” The reviewers do not give a “probable” date for when ITER might actually start, notes the expert with connections to the project, who estimates it at 2028 or 2029. “The answer is so devastating that if they came out and said it in public, they might lose [the support of ] the European Union,” he says.

The biggest assumption behind the schedule is that members will provide an extra €4.6 billion ($5.2 billion) between now and 2025. That money would enable the ITER organization to hire many more engineers, technicians, and skilled workers to assemble the parts that the members provide. It would also enable the ITER organization to develop a reserve fund for contingencies. However, the ITER Council made it clear at its last meeting in November 2015 that the cash would not be forthcoming. In particular, representatives of the European Union—which, as host, bears 45% of the financial burden—noted that the European Parliament has fixed spending on ITER through 2020, and it cannot be increased.

Since then, the ITER organization has been trying to figure out how to keep to the schedule at a lower annual cost, adjusting it even as reviewers were analyzing it. One option would be to delay the construction of some components that won’t be needed in the experiment’s early years, when it will run on just hydrogen or deuterium. Neither substance can support a burning plasma, so the start of runs to achieve one would have to wait an extra 3.5 years, until 2035, the report estimates. That date “is so far off that it’s more like an idea,” says Stephen Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, a nonprofit foundation in Gaithersburg, Maryland, that advocates for fusion development.

The review panel calls for the formulation of a real baseline by November. Reaching consensus on the schedule may be difficult, Dean warns, because ITER members have divergent priorities. Whereas the European Union frets over annual costs, Japan and South Korea worry about keeping the schedule for burning plasma, he says. That’s because they’re already planning ITER’s successors, “demo” power plants that would generate electricity. To build one by 2050, they need the ITER data as soon as possible. “From the beginning of the process the Asian countries wanted to get to [deuterium-tritium] burning as fast as possible,” Dean says. “They are not going to be happy to hear that the date for D-T burning is as far away as 2035.”

Clery, D. November 27, 2015. More delays for ITER fusion project…first plasma will take 6 years longer than planned. Science 350:1011.

Managers of the troubled ITER fusion project delivered a dose of reality last week: a new schedule that is likely to push the estimated date of completion back by 6 years, to 2025, and add roughly €2 billion to the project’s ballooning cost. Researchers have never managed to achieve a controlled fusion reaction on Earth that produces more energy than it consumes. ITER, with a doughnut-shaped “tokamak” reaction chamber able to contain 840 cubic meters of superheated hydrogen gas, or plasma, is the biggest attempt so far and should produce 500 megawatts of power from a 50 megawatt input. The project began in 2006 with an estimated cost of €5 billion and a start date—or first plasma—in 2016. The figures quickly changed to €15 billion and 2019, but confidence in those numbers has eroded over the years.

The cost of running the ITER organization and the seven “domestic agencies” that handle industrial contracts for each partner is very roughly €350 million per year, so the delay will add about €2 billion. Many factors have slowed progress, including the complexity of the project, delays in finalizing the design, and the demands of France’s nuclear regulator. ITER’s organizational structure is almost as complex as its technology. Each partner manufactures a share of the necessary components: 45% from the European Union (as host), and 9% from each of the others. How much each partner spends to fulfill its share is its own concern and is not revealed, making the true cost of the project difficult to assess.

Nature Editorial: Fusion furore. Soaring construction costs for ITER are jeopardizing alternative fusion projects. 23 July 2014. Nature #511: 383-384.

Fusion energy promises to combine the benefits of renewable resources — clean, carbon-free electric power — with the best qualities of fossil fuels: power day and night, without regard for the vagaries of weather.

The reality is much messier. Fusion power demands heating certain isotopes of hydrogen or other light elements to hundreds of millions of kelvin until they form ionized plasma. The plasma is contained by magnetic fields in a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) chamber until the nuclei fuse and convert mass into energy.

Physicists have struggled to harness fusion for more than six decades.

Only in 2006 did an international consortium sign an agreement to start work on ITER, the first reactor designed to ‘ignite’ fusion plasma such that it will be able to sustain its burn and generate more energy than it consumes. ITER has been under construction since 2010 on a site next to the Cadarache nuclear-research facility north of Marseilles, France.

Building costs have soared to roughly US$50 billion — 10 times the original figure — and the schedule has slipped by 11 years.

Instead of 2016, ITER is expected to start its first burning-plasma experiments in 2027— but only if the ITER team can solve technical challenges. ITER’s plasma chamber follows the tokamak design that has dominated fusion-energy research since the 1970s. Multiple magnetic coils, fuel injectors and the like make tokamaks large and complex.

Even more problematic is the fusion fuel that ITER will ultimately use: a mix of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The mixture has the virtue of igniting at just 100 million kelvin, lower than other potential fuels, but it also produces most of its energy as neutrons, which will damage the reactor walls — and make the reactor radioactive, producing another nuclear-waste-disposal problem.

Given these realities, the prudent course for the world’s funding agencies would be to support research into alternative fusion fuels, such as deuterium–helium-3 or proton–boron-11 — which require higher temperatures to ignite, but produce very few neutrons — as well as alternative reactor designs that would be simpler, cheaper and more in line with the kind of plant that power companies might buy.

But that is not happening, because of ITER. The treaty that set up the project requires each of the seven ITER Organization members (the European Union, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Russian Federation and the United States) to contribute a fixed portion to the cost of construction — whatever that happens to be. Overruns have left fusion programs with little cash for anything but ITER and the research efforts that support it.

The European Union, responsible for 45.5% of the cost, has been able to keep up by moving money from other projects. But the 9.1% borne by the United States, which historically has been by far the most willing to fund alternative concepts, could not have come at a worse time for the nation. In 2009, as ITER’s costs increased, fusion-program managers in the US Department of Energy were told by the administration of President Barack Obama that they would have to fulfill their share of ITER from a flat budget. In the ensuing crunch, nearly all the department’s alternative fusion-research programs have been cancelled.

Congress is furious. This year, the Senate voted to cancel the US contribution to ITER in fiscal year 2015, although the House of Representatives voted to maintain that contribution by boosting the fusion budget. Those contradictory decisions will have to be reconciled in the final budget. But in the meantime, following a congressional mandate in last year’s budget resolution, the energy department has convened a panel of scientists to devise a ten-year strategic plan for fusion-energy research — something the agency has not had for many years.

Both of these activities provide openings for Congress and the energy department to restore some of the funding for alternative fusion research. Academic projects worthy of consideration include a radically simplified design for a fusion power reactor developed by Thomas Jarboe and his group at the University of Washington in Seattle: they believe that it could be built for about one-tenth of the cost of a tokamak. And among the small fusion start-up companies worth considering for a federal small-business grant is Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in Middlesex, New Jersey, which is trying to exploit a configuration known as a dense plasma focus to build an extremely compact reactor that does not emit neutrons. ITER, the international fusion experiment under construction in Cadarache, France, aims to prove that nuclear fusion is a viable power source by creating a “burning plasma” that produces more energy than the machine itself consumes. Although that goal is at least 20 years away, ITER is already burning through money at a prodigious pace.

ITER was supposed to start running by 2016. Since then, however, the project has been plagued by delays, cost increases, and management problem. ITER is now expected to cost at least $21 billion and won’t turn on until 2020 at the earliest. And a recent review slammed ITER’s management.

The United States and ITER share a complicated history. The project was first proposed in 1985 as a joint venture with the Soviet Union and Japan. The United States backed out of that effort in 1998, citing concerns over cost and feasibility—only to jump in again in 2003. At the time, ITER was envisioned to cost roughly $5 billion. That estimate had grown to $12 billion by 2006, when the European Union, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and United States signed a formal agreement to build the device. The United States agreed, essentially, to build 9% of the parts for the reactor, at whatever price was necessary.

Cost to the United States

The United States is only a minor partner in the project, which began construction in 2008. But the U.S. contribution to ITER will total $3.9 billion—roughly four times as much as originally estimated—according to a new cost estimate released yesterday. That is about $1.4 billion higher than a 2011 cost estimate, and the numbers are likely to intensify doubts among some members of Congress about continuing the U.S. involvement in the project.

The cost of the U.S. contribution has increased, too, although by how much has been unclear. Officials with U.S. ITER had not released an updated cost profile for several years, until Ned Sauthoff, project manager for U.S. ITER at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, did so yesterday. Speaking to a meeting of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee in Rockville, Maryland, Sauthoff reported that the total cost of the U.S. contribution would be $3.9 billion by the time the project is done in 2034. The schedule assumes that ITER won’t start running until 2024 or 2025. In comparison, an April 2011 funding profile pegged the cost of U.S. ITER at $2.5 billion.

The reason for the difference lies mainly in the timing. The 2011 cost profile would have seen spending on U.S. ITER plateau at $350 million per year from 2014 through 2016. However, in 2013, DOE officials decided (as part of their budget request for the following year) to cap spending on ITER at $225 million per year to prevent the project from consuming the entire budget of DOE’s fusion energy sciences program. Stretching out the budget invariably increases costs, researchers say. This year, the fusion program has a total budget of $505 million, including the $200 million Congress ultimately decided to spend on ITER. Sauthoff stresses that ITER researchers are making concrete progress in construction. “There is very strong progress in the fabrication of components around the world,” he said in an e-mail after the meeting. “US components needed for the construction sequence are being completed for delivery in 2014 and 2015.”

The new numbers appear to be giving some members of Congress heartburn. In a separate hearing yesterday on the proposed 2015 budget for DOE, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chair of Energy and Water Development Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, said that a review by DOE officials suggested that the cost of U.S. ITER could rise as high as $6 billion—more, if the concerns over ITER management are not addressed. “I’m really beginning to believe that our involvement in ITER is not practical, that we will not gain what we hope to gain from it, and instead this money could be much better be spent elsewhere,” Feinstein said.

Could the United States really back out of ITER? The Obama administration conceives of the U.S. commitment to ITER as being on a par with a treaty agreement, one Washington insider says, so the administration simply cannot walk away from that commitment. But one Senate staffer who works for the Democratic majority says that’s only the administration’s position. In fact, the staffer says, the administration seems to be split, with officials at the State Department arguing that the U.S. commitment to ITER is inviolable and officials at DOE indicating that they’d be just as happy without the project on their hands. The staffer suggests that the conflict explains why the administration requested only $150 million for ITER next year instead of the supposed maximum of $225 million it had set earlier.

The Senate staffer suggests that if administration officials can’t make up their minds about ITER, Congress could do it for them in the next several months, as they write annual spending bills. “Our intention is make a decision for ourselves in our markup [of the 2015] budget,” the staffer says. “They won’t have a choice.”

Nuclear promises made in the past weren’t kept either

Many other nuclear wonders were to be in place by the year 2000: “Giant earth-stationary satellites bearing compact nuclear reactors will broadcast television programs”; nuclear-powered tankers and other merchant ships “will almost certainly ply the seas”; “peaceful nuclear explosives will be employed on a widespread scale” in underground mineral mining and used to modify the earth’s surface, alter river flows, and construct new canals and new harbors in Alaska and Siberia; and “nuclear propulsion” would carry men to Mars.  With physicist William Corliss, Seaborg advocated the creation of underground cities—a “nether frontier”—that would be carved out using nuclear explosives. The surface could then be returned to wilderness, and visiting it would be just a matter of getting into an elevator.

Source: 1971, Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and a Nobel Prize–winning chemist, delivered an address at the fourth International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy