Friday, May 29, 2009

Hardware: French Fusion Experiment Delayed Until 2025 or Beyond

Posted by timothy on Friday May 29, @06:10AM 
from the time-travel-will-patch-things-up dept.
PowerScience
An anonymous reader writes"The old joke is that fusion is the power of the future and always will be. But it's not looking so funny for ITER, an EU10 billion fusion experiment in France. According to Nature News, ITER will not conduct energy-producing experiments until at least 2025 — five years later than what had been previously agreed to. The article adds that the reactor will cost even more than the seven parties in the project first thought:'...Construction costs are likely to double from the 5-billion (US$7-billion) estimate provided by the project in 2006, as a result of rises in the price of raw materials, gaps in the original design, and an unanticipated increase in staffing to manage procurement. The cost of ITER's operations phase, another 5 billion over 20 years, may also rise.'"
  • science
  •  
  • fusion
  •  
  • iter
  •  
  • hardware
  •  
  • power
  •  
  • story

1 comment:

M. Simon said...

For the US contribution to one year of the cost overruns of ITER Polywell Fusion experiments could be fully funded for the four to six years it would take to produce a 100 MW demo reactor.

Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

Why hasn't Polywell Fusion been fully funded by the Obama administration?