thomas malloy wrote:
Let me restate the question. Do you of you people think that this thing
will work? IMHO, on a scale of 1 - 100, I give it a 5.
The ITER tokamak may never be built because of budget concerns. But if it
is constructed I expect it will meet most of the technical goals that have
been planned for it. Let us credit where it is due. The people building
these things are extremely knowledgeable and they have realistic goals. The
goals are narrow. The Princeton PPPL brochure, for example, says: "The goal
of TFTR is to produce 10 to 25 MW of fusion power for 1.0 second, when the
plasma is heated with a comparable amount of neutral beam power. Thus, it
will demonstrate approximate fusion energy breakeven using D-T plasmas.
Breakeven will occur when the D-T fusion power produced equals the power
required to heat the plasma." As far as I know, the reactor did come
reasonably close to this goal. (I believe it ran at ~10 MW for 0.6 seconds.)
In other words, you have to ask: "Will it work in what sense? How do you
define success?" Even if it does succeed according to plan, the extent of
that success may be so limited and so narrowly defined it is still not
worth the money. It will probably not represent a technical solution to any
existing problem. You can say the same thing about other government funded
high-tech ventures such as the Space Station, the supercollider, or Star
Wars. Even if Star Wars could guarantee the destruction of all incoming
missiles (which is completely out of the question), it would do nothing to
prevent a nuclear attack, because smuggling bombs is far cheaper, safer
(for the attacker), and more reliable than sending them on ICBMs. There is
absolutely no chance that China, Russia, North Korea or Bin Laden will fire
a nuclear missile at the U.S., but some experts say there is about a 20%
chance one of them will blow us up with a bomb sent by UPS.
What is unreasonable about the tokamak program is the way it is being
presented Congress, and the promises being made to the public. ITER will
achieve narrowly defined technical goals. But I do not think it can or will
bring us significantly closer to a practical form of energy, and it will
certainly not lead to a comprehensive solution to the energy crisis. Also,
as the LANL ARIES study showed, a working tokamak would probably produce
more pollution and radioactive waste than an uranium advanced fission
reactor would, so from the engineering point of view the tokamak is not
promising.
Tokamak fusion supporters have stressed that it will use deuterium, which
is available in virtually unlimited quantities at a very low cost per MJ.
But actually, we also have vast amounts of uranium, and it is reasonably
cheap. Much cheaper per MJ than oil or coal. Disposal of the used uranium
is a major problem, but it would also be a headache to dispose of the
irradiated materials from a tokamak reactor.
- Jed
- Will the ITER tokamak work? Jed Rothwell
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