Boy, that must really rot their socks! The big physics budget cut passed by the US Congress, practically dictated that they must pull out of ITER. Now, China has come in with big bucks.
ITER is a big world fusion project. For a while, Canada thought they could provide a site at Darlington, but France won out. The focus of the project is on the engineering aspects of maintaining a plasma fusion toroid. The project is not designed to be a net provider of energy.
2 comments:
The US may have pulled out because it has better options:
Bussard Fusion Reactor
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion
It has been funded:
Bussard Fusion Reactor Funded
Bussard Fusion Update
The above reactor can burn Deuterium which is very abundant and produces lots of neutrons or it can burn a mixture of Hydrogen and abundant Boron 11 which does not.
The implication of it is that we will know in 6 to 9 months if the small reactors of that design are feasible.
If they are we could have fusion plants generating electricity in 10 years or less depending on how much we want to spend to compress the time frame. A much better investment than CO2 sequestration.
BTW Bussard is not the only thing going on in IEC. There are a few government programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana among others.
The Japanese and Australians also have programs.
If you want to get deeper into the technology visit:
IEC Fusion Technology blog
Start with the sidebar which has links to tutorials and other stuff.
Wow, thanks.
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