Preface. When my husband Jeffery Kahn was a science writer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, astrophysicists told him fusion was 30 years away and always would be.

ITER was supposed to be ready in 2016, but the completion date for full fusion to produce net energy is now 2039. At the very end, below the references, I list the progress of ITER but got tired of how many delays there were and have stopped doing so.

After the overview below, there are over half a dozen more articles about fusion. There are many issues with fusion not included in this post, see the others in category Energy/Fusion here.

This website explains why the 80% of final energy is fossil fuels that cannot be replaced by electrification (or anything else), so even if fusion were possible it would not do any good — and there are limits to everything, not just fossils but minerals and the ecosystems we depend on.

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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Fusion is not likely to work out, yet it is the only possible energy source that could replace fossil fuels (No single or combination of alternative energy resources can replace fossil fuels).

Ugo Bardi (2014), in his book “Extracted” points out that even the minerals needed for nuclear fusion are finite, and the “infinitely abundant energy” thought possible at the beginning of the atomic age isn’t possible.  here’s why:

“In practice, past attempts to obtain controlled nuclear fusion as a source of energy had hinged on the possibility of fusing a heavier isotope of hydrogen, deuterium. But not even the controlled deuterium-deuterium reaction is considered feasible, and the current effort focuses on the reaction of a still heavier hydrogen isotope, tritium, with deuterium. Tritium is not a mineral resource, as it is so unstable that it doesn’t exist on Earth. But it can be created by bombarding a lithium isotope, Li-6, with neutrons that in turn can be created by the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction. (In this sense a fusion reactor is another kind of “breeder” reactor, as it produces its own fuel.) However, since the mineral resources of lithium are limited, and since the Li-6 isotope forms only 7.5 percent of the total, the problem of mineral depletion exists. 58″

The immense gravity of the sun creates fusion by pushing atoms together.  We can’t do that on earth, where the two choices (and the main projects pursuing them) are:

ITER uses magnetic fields to contain plasma until atoms collide and fuse. This has been compared to holding jello together with rubber bands.  Well, not really, ITER is far from being built:

• The cost so far is $22.3 billion
• The original deadline was 2016, the latest 2027 date is highly unlikely.
• Their goal of a ‘burning plasma’ that produces more energy than the machine itself consumes is at least 20 years away
• It’s so poorly run that a recent assessment found serious problems with the project’s leadership, management, and governance. The report was so damning the project’s governing body only allowed senior management to see it because they feared “the project could be interpreted as a major failure”.
• April 2014: The U.S. contribution to ITER will cost a total of $3.9 billion — 4 times as much as originally estimated according to a report that came out April 10, 2014
• Even if ITER does reach break-even someday, it will have produced just heat, not the ultimate aim, electricity. More work will be needed to hook it up to a generator. For ITER and tokamaks in general, commercialization remains several decades away.

Hirsch RL, Bezdek RH (2021) Fusion: Ten times more expensive than nuclear power. RealClearEnergy.org.

Hirsch & Bezdek wrote the 2005 Department of Energy Peak Oil report.

The U.S. and world fusion energy research programs are developing something that no one will want or can afford. Ever so slowly the promise of commercially viable fusion power from tokamaks has ebbed away.  Some recognized the worsening commercial outlook, but most researchers simply continued to study and increase the size of their tokamak devices — and to increase the size of their budgets.

Today, the ITER plant, which was initially expected to cost $5 billion, will now cost somewhere between $22 and 65 billion dollars.  Even at $22 billion, the cost is ten times more than a nuclear fission power plant, and 30 times more if $65 billion.  And nuclear fission power plants are considered to be too expensive for further adoption in the U.S.

The largest source of tritium in the world is heavy water nuclear reactors in Canada. The combination of very limited world production of tritium and its loss by radioactive decay means that world supplies of tritium are inherently limited.  It has recently become clear that world supplies of tritium for larger fusion experiments are limited to the point that world supplies are inadequate for future fusion pilot plants, let alone commercial fusion reactors based on the deuterium-tritium fuel cycle.  In other words, fusion researchers are developing a fusion concept for which there will not be enough fuel in the world to operate!

So fusion researchers are developing a fusion concept that stands no hope of being economically acceptable, running on a fuel that does not exist in adequate quantities.

To stop wasting funding on these pointless fusion projects, we recently suggested to the Secretary of Energy that she appoint a panel of non-fusion engineers and environmentalists to conduct the objective, independent evaluation we believe is necessary.

NRC (2021) Bringing Fusion to the U.S. Grid. National Research Council, National Academies Press.

This document starts out reasonably understandable in the summary.  Fusion science sounds cool, with words like corrosion, fracture toughness, peeling, and ballooning, like surfer slang action verbs of rip, ragdolled, and barreled.

Here’s a fairly understandable paragraph describing what needs to be solved before a pilot plant can be built.  A pilot plant is a tiny baby plant, far from producing profitable, commercial electricity with a positive energy return.

“Virtually every major component of a future nuclear fusion energy reactor will require materials development in order to provide confidence in the ability to withstand significant limits of essential material properties including: neutron damage, creep resistance, fracture toughness, surface erosion/re-deposition, corrosion, chemistry, thermal conductivity and many others. A particular challenge is the need to safely and efficiently close the fuel cycle, which for deuterium-tritium fusion designs involves the development of blankets to breed and extract tritium, as well as the fueling, exhausting, confining, extracting, and separating tritium in significant quantities.”

But then, like all “how far away is fusion” documents it gets into the weeds, where you need a degree in nuclear engineering to understand it.  For example, can you make any sense out of the following barrier to making fusion work?

Power exhaust in high power density, compact fusion systems has two key challenges. One is the experimentally observed narrow steady-state e-folding length of power flow in the scrape-off-layer (SOL). Since the peak heat flux at the divertor plate (qdiv) is inversely proportional to the power e-folding length [Greek formula with letters not on my keyboard], narrow power e-folding length gives rise to an excessive heat flux at the divertor plate. Experimental observation shows [Greek formula] where [Greek formula] and [Greek formula] are power e-folding length and the poloidal field at the plasma surface. Since [Greek formula], power e-folding length in a compact fusion device tends to be smaller. However, the high operating density of a compact fusion device is likely beneficial for enhancing radiative cooling and to achieve detached plasma state.  Another challenge is taming the transient heat flux including those due to ELMs (Edge Localized Mode). ELMs are an edge relaxation phenomena driven by the peeling/ballooning mode, whose onset is reasonably well understood and characterized.  ELM Suppression by methods such as application of 3D magnetic perturbations in DIII-D¹⁴ reveals the promise for minimizing the impact of transient heat fluxes on the first wall, but much more research is required, especially for managing the heat flux challenge of a compact, high power density fusion reactor.

But you can almost understand that the solution of “High plasma core power density presents a significant heat exhaust challenge for the plasma facing components, armor, and first wall in fusion systems” which probably means that a bunch of important stuff will melt If Solutions Aren’t Found.

The next paragraph is another mystery (not shown), and so is the solution: the  Department of Energy needs to “support studies of the compatibility of innovative divertor designs in toroidal confinement concepts with divertor plasma detachment, which can significantly relax the radiated power requirement, and including the possibility of liquid metal PFCs, and create a research program and facilities with linear devices for testing plasma facing components and non-plasma heat flux testing platforms, to identify, evaluate, and finalize a high-confidence, robust design for PFC and first wall armor materials, including both solid and liquid metal options, that are compatible with managing steady state and transient power loading.”

And so on.  The main reason to try read these documents even if you don’t understand them, is that you will really understand why fusion will be forever 30 years away, a phrase that’s a favorite of nuclear engineers themselves.

This document has nothing on fusion studies that go far more in depth describing the challenges.  Please do check out the following 247-page free book:  NRC. 2013 An Assessment of the Prospects for Inertial Fusion Energy. National Research Council, National Academies Press.   Or give it to an enemy to induce headaches.

My impression after reading many fusion books is that equipment has to be built with atomic precision, not a single atom out of place in some components.  Really???  And even if that were possible, with global conventional oil production flat-lining since 2005 and all oil, conventional and unconventional peaking in production in 2018, the world of the future will be much simpler, with precision of less than a thousandth of an inch (for more on that, read: Winchester S (2018) The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World).

Moyer (2010) Fusion’s False Dawn. Scientific American.

Scientists have long dreamed of harnessing nuclear fusion—the power plant of the stars—for a safe, clean and virtually unlimited energy supply. Even as a historic milestone nears, skeptics question whether a working reactor will ever be possible

The deuterium-tritium fusion only kicks in at temperatures above 150 million degrees Celsius — 25,00 times hotter than the surface of the sun.

Yet the flash of ignition may be the easy part. The challenges of constructing and operating a fusion-based power plant could be more severe than the physics challenge of generating the fireballs in the first place.  A working reactor would have to be made of materials that can withstand temperatures of millions of degrees for years on end. It would be constantly bombarded by high-energy nuclear particles–conditions that turn ordinary materials brittle and radioactive. It has to make its own nuclear fuel in a complex breeding process. And to be a useful energy-producing member of the electricity grid, it has to do these things pretty much constantly–with no outages, interruptions or mishaps–for decades.

Fusion plasmas are hard to control. Imagine holding a large, squishy balloon. Now squeeze it down to as small as it will go. No matter how evenly you apply pressure, the balloon will always squirt out through a space between your fingers. The same problem applies to plasmas. Anytime scientists tried to clench them down into a tight enough ball to induce fusion, the plasma would find a way to squirt out the sides. It is a paradox germane to all types of fusion reactors–the hotter you make the plasma and the tighter you squeeze it, the more it fights your efforts to contain it.  So scientists have built ever larger magnetic bottles, but every time they did so, new problems emerged.

No matter how you make fusion happen–whether you use megajoule lasers (like at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) or the crunch of magnetic fields–energy payout will come in the currency of neutrons. Because these particles are neutral, they are not affected by electric or magnetic fields. Moreover, they pass straight through most solid materials as well.

The only way to make a neutron stop is to have it directly strike an atomic nucleus. Such collisions are often ruinous. The neutrons coming out of a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction are so energetic that they can knock out of position an atom in what would ordinarily be a strong metal–steel for instance. Over time these whacks weaken a reactor, turning structural components brittle.

Other times the neutrons will turn material radioactive, dangerously so.

Other times the neutrons will turn benign material radioactive. When a neutron hits an atomic nucleus, the nucleus can absorb the neutron and become unstable. A steady stream of neutrons—even if they come from a “clean” reaction such as fusion—would make any ordinary container dangerously radioactive, Baker says. “If someone wants to sell you any kind of nuclear system and says there is no radioactivity, hang onto your wallet.”

A fusion-based power plant must also convert energy from the neutrons into heat that drives a turbine. Future reactor designs make the conversion in a region surrounding the fusion core called the blanket. Although the chance is small that a given neutron will hit any single atomic nucleus in a blanket, a blanket thick enough and made from the right material—a few meters’ worth of steel, perhaps—will capture nearly all the neutrons passing through. These collisions heat the blanket, and a liquid coolant such as molten salt draws that heat out of the reactor. The hot salt is then used to boil water, and as in any other generator, this steam spins a turbine to generate electricity.

Except it is not so simple. The blanket has another job, one just as critical to the ultimate success of the reactor as extracting energy. The blanket has to make the fuel that will eventually go back into the reactor.

Although deuterium is cheap and abundant, tritium is exceptionally rare and must be harvested from nuclear reactions. An ordinary nuclear power plant can make between two to three kilograms of it in a year, at an estimated cost of between $80 million and $120 million a kilogram. Unfortunately, a magnetic fusion plant will consume about a kilogram of tritium a week. “The fusion needs are way, way beyond what fission can supply,” says Mohamed Abdou, director of the Fusion Science and Technology Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

For a fusion plant to generate its own tritium, it has to borrow some of the neutrons that would otherwise be used for energy. Inside the blanket channels of lithium, a soft, highly reactive metal, would capture energetic neutrons to make helium and tritium. The tritium would escape out through the channels, get captured by the reactor and be reinjected into the plasma.

When you get to the fine print, though, the accounting becomes precarious. Every fusion reaction devours exactly one tritium ion and produces exactly one neutron. So every neutron coming out of the reactor must make at least one tritium ion, or else the reactor will soon run a tritium deficit—consuming more than it creates. Avoiding this obstacle is possible only if scientists manage to induce a complicated cascade of reactions. First, a neutron hits a lithium 7 isotope, which, although it consumes energy, produces both a tritium ion and a neutron. Then this second neutron goes on to hit a lithium 6 isotope and produce a second tritium ion.

Moreover, all this tritium has to be collected and reintroduced to the plasma with near 100 percent efficiency. “In this chain reaction you cannot lose a single neutron, otherwise the reaction stops,” says Michael Dittmar, a particle physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Zurich. “The first thing one should do [before building a reactor] is to show that the tritium production can function. It is pretty obvious that this is completely out of the question.”

“This is a very fancy gadget, this fusion blanket,” Hazeltine says. “It is accepting a lot of heat and taking care of that heat without overheating itself. It is accepting neutrons, and it is made out of very sophisticated materials so it doesn’t have a short lifetime in the face of those neutrons. And it is taking those neutrons and using them to turn lithium into tritium.

ITER, unfortunately, will not test blanket designs. That is why many scientists—especially those in the U.S., which is not playing a large role in the design, construction or operation of ITER—argue that a separate facility is needed to design and build a blanket. “You must show that you can do this in a practical system,” Abdou says, “and we have never built or tested a blanket. Never.” If such a test facility received funding tomorrow, Abdou estimates that it would take between 30 and 75 years to understand the issues sufficiently well to begin construction on an operational power plant. “I believe it’s doable,” he says, “but it’s a lot of work.”

The Big Lie

Let’s say it happens. The year is 2050. Both the NIF and ITER were unqualified successes, hitting their targets for energy gain on time and under budget. Mother Nature held no surprises as physicists ramped up the energy in each system; the ever unruly plasmas behaved as expected. A separate materials facility demonstrated how to build a blanket that could generate tritium and convert neutrons to electricity, as well as stand up to the subatomic stresses of daily use in a fusion plant. And let’s assume that the estimated cost for a working fusion plant is only $10 billion. Will it be a useful option?

Even for those who have spent their lives pursuing the dream of fusion energy, the question is a difficult one to answer. The problem is that fusion-based power plants—like ordinary fission plants—would be used to generate baseload power. That is, to recoup their high initial costs, they would need to always be on. “Whenever you have any system that is capital-intensive, you want to run it around the clock because you are not paying for the fuel,” Baker says.

Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to keep a plasma going for any appreciable length of time. So far reactors have been able to maintain a fusing plasma for less than a second. The goal of ITER is to maintain a burning plasma for tens of seconds. Going from that duration to around-the-clock operation is yet another huge leap. “Fusion will need to hit 90 percent availability,” says Baker, a figure that includes the downtime required for regular maintenance. “This is by far the greatest uncertainty in projecting the economic reliability of fusion systems.

It used to be that fusion was [seen as] fundamentally different from dirty fossil fuels or dangerous uranium. It was beautiful and pure—a permanent fix, an end to our thirst for energy. It was as close to the perfection of the cosmos as humans were ever likely to get. Now those visions are receding. Fusion is just one more option and one that will take decades of work to bear fruit…the age of unlimited energy is not [in sight].

Clery D (2013) The Most Expensive Science Experiment Ever. Popular Science.

Some people have spent their whole working lives researching fusion and then retired feeling bitter at what they see as a wasted career. But that hasn’t stopped new recruits joining the effort every year…, perhaps motivated by … the need for fusion has never been greater, considering the twin threats of dwindling oil supplies and climate change.  ITER won’t generate any electricity, but designers hope to go beyond break-even and spark enough fusion reactions to produce 10 times as much heat as that pumped in to make it work.

To get there requires a reactor of epic proportions:

• The building containing the reactor will be nearly 200 feet tall and extend 43 feet underground.
• The reactor inside will weigh 23,000 tons.
• Rare earth metal niobium will be combined with tin to make superconducting wires for the reactor’s magnets. When finished, they will have made 50,000 miles of wire, enough to wrap around the equator twice.
• There will be 18 magnets, each 46 feet tall and weighing 360 tons (as much as a fully-laden jumbo jet) with  giant D-shaped coils of wire forming the electromagnets used to contain the plasma

That huge sum of money is, for the nations involved, a gamble against a future in which access to energy will become an issue of national security. Most agree that oil production is going to decline sharply during this century.  That doesn’t leave many options for the world’s future energy supplies. Conventional nuclear power makes people uneasy for many reasons, including safety, the problems of disposing of waste, nuclear proliferation and terrorism.

Alternative energy sources such as wind, wave and solar power will undoubtedly be a part of our energy future. It would be very hard, however, for our modern energy-hungry society to function on alternative energy alone because it is naturally intermittent–sometimes the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow–and also diffuse–alternative technologies take up a lot of space to produce not very much power.

Difficult choices lie ahead over energy and, some fear, wars will be fought in coming decades over access to energy resources, especially as the vast populations of countries such China and India increase in prosperity and demand more energy. Anywhere that oil is produced or transported–the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Arctic–could be a flashpoint. Supporting fusion is like backing a long shot: it may not come through, but if it does it will pay back handsomely. No one is promising that fusion energy will be cheap; reactors are expensive things to build and operate. But in a fusion-powered world geopolitics would no longer be dominated by the oil industry, so no more oil embargoes, no wild swings in the price of crude and no more worrying that Russia will turn off the tap on its gas pipelines.

Hambling D (2011) Star power: Small fusion start-ups aim for break-even. NewScientist.

The deuterium-tritium fusion only kicks in at temperatures above 150 million degrees Celcius — 25,00 times hotter than the surface of the sun. Not only does reaching such temperatures require a lot of energy, but no known material can withstand them once they have been achieved. The ultra-hot, ultra-dense plasma at the heart of a fusion reactor must instead be kept well away from the walls of its container using magnetic fields. Following a trick devised in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the plasma is generated inside a doughnut or torus-shaped vessel, where encircling magnetic fields keep the plasma spiraling clear of the walls – a configuration known as a tokamak. This confinement is not perfect: the plasma has a tendency to expand, cool and leak out, limiting the time during which fusion can occur. The bigger the tokamak, the better the chance of extracting a meaningful amount of energy, since larger magnetic fields hold the plasma at a greater distance, meaning a longer confinement time.

Break-even is the dream ITER was conceived to realize.

With a huge confinement volume, it should contain a plasma for several minutes, ultimately producing 10 times as much power as is put in.  But this long confinement time brings its own challenges. An elaborate system of gutters is needed to extract from the plasma the helium produced in the reaction, along with other impurities. The neutrons emitted, which are chargeless and so not contained by magnetic fields, bombard the inside wall of the torus, making it radioactive and meaning it must be regularly replaced. These neutrons are also needed to breed the tritium that sustains the reaction, so the walls must be designed in such a way that the neutrons can be captured on lithium to make tritium. The details of how to do this are still being worked out.

The success of the project is by no means guaranteed 

“We know we can produce plasmas with all the right elements, but when you are operating on this scale there are uncertainties,” says David Campbell, a senior ITER scientist. Extrapolations from the performance of predecessors suggest a range of possible outcomes, he says. The most likely is that ITER will work as planned, delivering 10 times break-even energy. Yet there is a chance it might work better – or produce too little energy to be useful for commercial fusion.

Richard Wolfson, in “Nuclear Choices: A Citizen’s Guide to Nuclear Technology”:

“In the long run, fusion itself could bring on the ultimate climactic crisis. The energy released in fusion would not otherwise be available on Earth; it would represent a new input to the global energy flow. Like all the rest of the global energy, fusion energy would ultimately become heat that Earth would have to radiate into space. As long as humanity kept its energy consumption a tiny fraction of the global energy flow, there would be no major problem. But history shows that human energy consumption grows rapidly when it is not limited by shortages of fuel. Fusion fuel would be unlimited, so our species might expand its energy consumption to the point where the output of our fusion reactors became significant relative to the global input of solar energy. At that point Earth’s temperature would inevitably rise. This long-term criticism of fusion holds for any energy source that could add to Earth’s energy flow even a few percent of what the Sun provides. Only solar energy itself escapes this criticism”. page 274

Robert L. Hirsch, author of the Department of Energy 2005 Peak Oil study, in his book “The Impending World Energy Mess”:

“Fusion has been in the research stage since the 1950s….Fusion happens when fuels are heated to hundreds of millions of degrees long enough for more energy to be released than was used to create the heat. Containment of fusion fuels on the sun is by gravity. Since gravity is not usable for fusion on earth, researchers have used magnetic fields, electrostatic fields, and inertia to provide containment. Thus far, no magnetic or electrostatic fusion concept has demonstrated success.”  Hirsch thinks this will never work out and it’s been a waste of tens of billions of dollars.

William Parkins, formerly the chief scientist at Rockwell International, asks in the 10 Mar 2006 edition of Science  “Fusion Power: Will it Ever Come?“

When I read Parkins article and translated some of the measurements to ones more familiar to me, it was obvious that fusion would never see the light of day:

• Fusion requires heating D-T (deuterium-tritium) to a temperature of 180 million degrees Fahrenheit — 6.5 times hotter than the core of the sun.
• So much heat is generated that the reactor vacuum vessel has to be at least 65 feet long, and no matter what the material, will need to be replaced periodically because the heat will make the reactor increasingly brittle as it undergoes radiation damage.  The vessel must retain vacuum integrity, requiring many connections for heat transfer and other systems.  Vacuum leaks are inevitable and could only be solved with remotely controlled equipment.
• A major part of the cost of a fusion plant is the blanket-shield component. Its area equals that of the reactor vacuum vessel, about 4,500 cubic yards in a 1000 MWe plant.  The surrounding blanket-shield, made of expensive materials, would need to be at least 5.5 feet thick and weigh 10,000 metric tons, conservatively costing $1.8 billion dollars.

Here are some of the other difficulties Parkins points out in this article:

The blanket-shield component “amounts to $1,800/kWe of rated capacity—more than nuclear fission reactor plants cost today. This does not include the vacuum vessel, magnetic field windings with their associated cryogenic system, and other systems for vacuum pumping, plasma heating, fueling, “ash” removal, and hydrogen isotope separation. Helium compressors, primary heat exchangers, and power conversion components would have to be housed outside of the steel containment building—required to prevent escape of radioactive tritium in the event of an accident. It will be at least twice the diameter of those common in nuclear plants because of the size of the fusion reactor.

Scaling of the construction costs from the Bechtel estimates suggests a total plant cost on the order of $15 billion, or $15,000/kWe of plant rating. At a plant factor of 0.8 and total annual charges of 17% against the capital investment, these capital charges alone would contribute 36 cents to the cost of generating each kilowatt hour. This is far outside the competitive price range.

The history of this dream is as expensive as it is discouraging. Over the past half-century, fusion appropriations in the U.S. federal budget alone have run at about a quarter-billion dollars a year. Lobbying by some members of the physics community has resulted in a concentration of work at a few major projects—the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the multinational facility now scheduled to be constructed in France after prolonged negotiation. NIF is years behind schedule and greatly over budget; it has poor political prospects, and the requirement for waiting between laser shots makes it a doubtful source for reliable power.

Even if a practical means of generating a sustained, net power-producing fusion reaction were found, prospects of excessive plant cost per unit of electric output, requirement for reactor vessel replacement, and need for remote maintenance for ensuring vessel vacuum integrity lie ahead. What executive would invest in a fusion power plant if faced with any one of these obstacles? It’s time to sell fusion for physics, not power”.

Former House of Representatives Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), head of the “Peak Oil Caucus”:

“…hoping to solve our energy problems with fusion is a bit like you or me hoping to solve our personal financial problems by winning the lottery. That would be real nice. I think the odds are somewhere near the same. I am about as likely to win the lottery as we are to come to economically feasible fusion.”

Bartlett’s full speech to congress: http://www.energybulletin.net/4733.html

National Academy of Sciences. 2013. An Assessment of the Prospects for Inertial Fusion Energy

The 3 principal research efforts in the USA are all trying to implode fusion fuel pellets by: (1) lasers, including solid state lasers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) NIF and the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE), as well as the krypton fluoride gas lasers at the Naval Research Laboratory; (2) particle beams, being explored by a consortium of laboratories led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); and (3) pulsed magnetic fields, being explored on the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories. The minimum technical accomplishment that would give confidence that commercial fusion may be feasible—the ignition of a fuel pellet in the laboratory—has not been achieved.

This is 247 pages long chock-full of the problems that fusion must overcome – not just technical but the funding — billions of dollars in the unlikely event any of the various flavors of fusion makes enough progress to scale up to a higher level.  If you ever wanted to know the minutiae of why fusion will never work, this is a great document to read  — if you can understand it that is.  I spent about 10 minutes grabbing just a few of the hundreds of “challenges” that need to be overcome:

• Making a reliable, long-lived chamber is challenging since the charged particles, target debris, and X-rays will erode the wall surface and the neutrons will embrittle and weaken the solid materials.
• Unless the initial layer surfaces are very smooth (i.e., perturbations are smaller than about 20 nm), short-wavelength (wavelength comparable to shell thickness) perturbations can grow rapidly and destroy the compressing shell. Mix Similarly, near the end of the implosion, such instabilities can mix colder material into the spot that must be heated to ignition. If too much cold material is injected into the hot spot, ignition will not occur. Most of the fuel must be compressed to high density, approximately 1,000 to 4,000 times solid density.
• To initiate fusion, the deuterium and tritium fuel must be heated to over 50 million degrees and held together long enough for the reactions to take place. Drivers must deliver very uniform ablation; otherwise the target is compressed asymmetrically. If the compression of the target is insufficient, the fusion reaction rate is too slow and the target disassembles before the reactions take place. Asymmetric compression excites strong Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities that spoil compression and mix dense cold plasma with the less dense hot spot. Preheating of the target can also spoil compression. For example, mistimed driver pulses can shock heat the target before compression. Also, interaction of the driver with the surrounding plasma can create fast electrons that penetrate and preheat the target.
• The technology for the reactor chambers, including heat exhaust and management of tritium, involves difficult and complicated issues with multiple, frequently competing goals and requirements.  Understanding the performance at the level of subsystems such as a breeding blanket and tritium management, and integrating these complex subsystems into a robust and self-consistent design will be very challenging.
• Avoiding frequent replacement of components that are difficult to access and replace will be important to achieving high availability. Such components will need to achieve a very high level of operational reliability.
• Experimental investigations of the fast-ignition concept are challenging and involve extremely high-energy-density physics: ultraintense lasers (>1019 W cm–2); pressures in excess of 1 Gbar; magnetic fields in excess of 100 MG; and electric fields in excess of 1012 V/m. Addressing the sheer complexity and scale of the problem inherently requires the high-energy and high-power laser facilities

References

Bardi, Ugo. 2014. Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Biello, David.  June 2014. A Milestone on the Long and Winding Road to Fusion.  Scientific American.

Chang, Ken. Mar 18, 2014. Machinery of an Energy Dream Machinery of an Energy Dream. New York Times.

Clery, D. 28 February 2014. New Review Slams Fusion Project’s Management. Science: Vol. 343 no. 6174 pp. 957-8.

Hinkel, D *, Springer P * , Standen, A, Krasny, M. Feb 13, 2014. Bay Area Scientists Make Breakthrough on Nuclear Fusion. Forum. (*) scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Moyer, M. March/April 2010. Fusion’s False Dawn. Scientific American.

Perlman, David. Feb 13, 2014. Livermore Lab’s fusion energy tests get closer to ‘ignition’. San Francisco Chronicle.

ITER has been delayed so many times I stopped tracking it, but here are some posts when I did:

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. Oil production has been on a plateau since 2005, within a decade or two we are likely to see energy decline and run out of time.  Nor can fusion make the 500,000 products that use fossil fuels as feedstock and the natural gas based fertilizer that feeds over 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