Fusion Will Be Available in 20 Years (Again): Why ITER Launch Has Been Pushed Back to 2039
Read more about the difficulties and prospects of controlled thermonuclear fusion below.
What's happened?
The first plasma at the international thermonuclear reactor was planned to be obtained in 2025. Now the organizers have announced that the tests will not only be postponed for 11 years, but will also require an increase in costs – by $5.4 billion at once. The postponement itself is caused by technical problems and a lack of funds.
ITER chief Pietro Barabaschi said that even without identifying the defect, the deadline could not be it was possible to endure. The process of creating the reactor turned out to be more complicated than planned. But the postponement of the reactor launch does not mean that the site will turn into a sleepy kingdom for 11 years: scientific research will continue – for example, experiments with small plasma currents. The head of the project added that even mastering controlled nuclear fusion will not solve the most pressing problems that humanity currently faces.
This is the second major revision of the project's budget and timeline in the last eight years. Immediately after construction began, it was planned that the total cost of ITER would not exceed $5 billion, and testing would begin in 2020. Now the budget has already exceeded $22 billion, and the first launch will take 15 years.
Consequences of the launch postponement
The scientists have also tried to find a positive consequence of the delay. They plan to be able to launch continuous two-year studies in 2034, rather than a series of separate experiments. This will allow the reactor to reach full capacity faster. As a result, although the first experiments with plasma in the reactor are delayed by almost a decade, the system will reach its design capacity only three years later than expected under the previous plan.
Unfortunately, delays create serious risks. Some participating countries may withdraw from the project, taking their share of the finances and resources.
Besides, other research groups are also working with thermonuclear reactors and may achieve their goal earlier than ITER. However, the period of expecting quick successes from them has passed. This was seriously discussed in 2014 Promise Lockheed Martin to create a compact thermonuclear reactor in five years. Now it is possible to achieve the required temperatures and hold the plasma for the required time… but in different experiments. Moreover, in 2022, one scientific group announced a positive energy yield: they received more from the thermonuclear reaction than they spent on heating the plasma. But an honest calculation shows that the total energy costs were tens of times greater than the obtained value. In general, competitors now have a long and thorny (although very interesting) road to a permanently operating reactor – but ITER has already passed part of it. And what has the international group of scientists already managed to do and how did the reactor appear in the first place? Spoiler: as always, the USSR and Russia were involved.
How ITER came to be and what scientists are planning
The idea of creating a reactor appeared back in 1985. USSR academician Yevgeny Velikhov proposed that scientists from Europe, the USA and Japan create a thermonuclear reactor together. The idea seemed interesting to the governments of the aforementioned states and regions, so a discussion began on the possible distribution of roles for scientific teams from around the world in a single project. In 1986, an agreement was reached on the design of a scientific installation, which was named the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). The reactor type is a classic tokamak. The operating principle is thermonuclear fusion with magnetic confinement.
In 1992, the participating countries signed a quadripartite agreement on developing an engineering design for the reactor. After that, negotiations were held for a long time, work was planned, a possible construction site was chosen – in 2005, preference was given to the outskirts of the city of Cadarache in the south of France.
In 2011, construction finally began. A divertor was added to the classic tokamak reactor design, which cleans the plasma of impurities. At first, assembly went relatively smoothly, although not without problems. But closer to the end of construction, a lot of shortcomings were revealed. In January 2023, it turned out that the cooling pipes would have to be replaced – the technology used for welding pipes and panels brought to the appearance of microcracks. This was facilitated by chlorine residues that got into tiny cavities during the welding process, which bike to corrosion, and the stress in the metal that arose after welding tore the pipes apart. It was necessary to choose a new welding technology and replace 23 kilometers (!) of pipes.
In June 2023 it turned outthat some of the welding operations on the ITER thermonuclear reactor project were carried out by welders with forged certificates. The work they had done had to be re-inspected.
In July of the same year were discovered manufacturing and assembly defects of components – sectors were manufactured with dimensions violation, and the cooling system developed cracks. This was the “straw that broke the camel's back” – replacing the sectors will take years.
Nevertheless, the project continues to live, and the reactor, as scientists hope, will be able to demonstrate the viability of the idea of obtaining energy as a result of thermonuclear fusion. Incidentally, ITER will not produce electrical energy. This is only a demo, a proof of the concept of launching a controlled thermonuclear reaction with the production of excess energy. The reactor must generate 500 MW of energy for at least 400 seconds with a startup cost of 50 MW. If the viability of the idea is proven, then the creation of a working thermonuclear reactor will begin.
So, it will take another 20 years to create a fully-fledged controlled thermonuclear fusion. But the process is interesting.
What happens inside a tokamak?
And finally, let me remind you what happens inside the tokamak: the substance is heated to a temperature of about 150 million degrees – 10 times higher than in the center of the Sun. At this temperature, any material goes into a plasma state, so the substance can only be held remotely – with the help of powerful magnetic fields. According to data from previous experiments, this temperature is enough to trigger a self-sustaining fusion reaction: hydrogen isotopes – deuterium and tritium – will collide to form a helium nucleus, a neutron and a gigantic release of energy. The energy obtained will be more than enough to cover the cost of heating the plasma many times over. At least, that's the plan.
