New Review Slams Fusion Project's Management 109
sciencehabit writes "ITER, the international fusion reactor project in France, is reeling from an assessment that found serious problems with the project's leadership, management, and governance. The report is so damning that after a 13 February special session that reviewed and accepted the report's conclusions and recommendations, the ITER Council — the project's governing body — restricted its readership to a small number of senior managers and council members. 'We feared that if [the assessment] leaked to people who don't know about the ITER agreement, the project could be interpreted as a major failure, which is not what the management assessor intended,' says nuclear engineer Bob Iotti of the consulting firm CH2M HILL, who chairs that council."
Re:Not the way to economical fusion power generati (Score:4, Informative)
I remember the original ITER propaganda. Originally it did not have DEMO on it as a successor. It was supposed to be the direct precursor to an actual power plant. They added that afterwards. It has been nearly two decades since that and they still haven't built it. While some things did happen to improve tokamaks, like the superconducting magnets used in JT-60 and Tore Supra, or the improved plasma control and stability they demonstrated in D-III, the same problems still exist. You can only generate net energy with D-T fusion and the reactor walls can't survive the neutron flux of D-T fusion long enough for a viable reactor to exist. Until THAT gets solved you are not going to see any commercial fusion reactor. Even if they solved that it is going to be huge and expensive. A lot more expensive than a fission nuclear reactor. Unless they manage to make the plasma more dense or something.
Re:Fusion is always 20 years from now (Score:4, Informative)
That MIT survey concluded we're about 80 billion USD away from practical fusion, since if you follow the progress of funding cuts it's more less or less kept being cut every few years, ensuring that the project is always about 20 years away.
It's research who's budget has gone down continuously since the 70s.
Re:Fusion is always 20 years from now (Score:5, Informative)
If you are criticizing fusion predictions, and aren't aware of that graph, then you are basically criticizing things you don't understand. Stop it. Understand first, then criticize.
Re:What could go wrong (Score:5, Informative)
multi-billion dollar international project led by the French. What could go wrong?
French managed many big industrial projects on their own. To name a few: Ariane, Concorde, nuclear reactors and nukes...