[myrmidon]

> I call things like ITER "Blazing Saddles" projects. "We have to protect our phony baloney jobs, gentlemen!"

I think this is overly harsh and somewhat unfair. You could make the same argument that anything operating in a regime similar to the Chicago Pile 1 could never be an economical reactor nor a bomb, but that does not mean skipping that particular development step is viable.

As far as fusion reporting goes, articles are at least somewhat consistent on the fact that ITER is a pure research project/reactor, while every 10-man fusion startup is being hyped up beyond all reason even if there is not even a credible roadmap towards an actual reactor in the 100MW range at all.

Personally I don't see fusion being a mainstream energy source (or helpful against climate change) in this century at all and maybe never, but ITER (even with all the delays) is at least an honest attempt at a credible size, and being stuck on older technology is an unfortunate side-effect of that.

[pfdietz]

I don't think it's unfair at all. And I don't see ITER as an "honest attempt", far from it.

The initial cost figures for ITER were obviously deliberate lies. When the true costs inevitably came out (after commitment had been made) this led to alternative approaches being canned. ITER has done grievous damage to fusion as a field, in a way eerily similar to how the Space Shuttle and ISS have done damage to NASA.

The true purpose of ITER wasn't to achieve fusion or push forward fusion; it was to preserve funding until those making the decisions had retired. If this required sacrificing long term goals, like actually delivering competitive energy (or, really, delivering anything at all), so be it.

[myrmidon]

As an engineer, the difference between "deliberate lies" and "overoptimistic estimates" is often just in the eye of the beholder; Hanlons Razor should be applied IMO.

Was ITER overambitious? Timeline and budget unrealistic from the start? Maybe. But I'm fairly confident that most people involved had perfectly defensible intentions.

I also think that if the goal is commercial fusion, small reactors (100MW and below) are nothing but a stepping stone and inherently commercially useless; I don't see the output (hundreds of termal megawatts) ever justifying the "fixed" overhead costs, and a scale at least close to GW scale seems completely inevitable to me.

If you agree with that premise, then building a reactor that size has a lot of utility already that you'd never achieve from building Wendelstein 7x equivalents or whatever at 50 different university campuses (or however else you'd want to spend the funds instead).

> The true purpose of ITER wasn't to achieve fusion or push forward fusion; it was to preserve funding until those making the decisions had retired. If this required sacrificing long term goals, like actually delivering competitive energy (or, really, delivering anything at all), so be it.

This is what I most disagree with; if commercial fusion is viable (I believe it really isn't) then I think ITER (or an equivalent of its size) is a very necessary, if expensive, step to make, and spending the money on dozens of smaller projects is not an "obviously better long term approach" at all in my view.

I also think that speaking about "true purpose" of the whole project is personifying the output of a complex process way too much, where individual actors in that scheme just want to make ITER happen (for very defensible reasons IMO).

[cobbzilla]

conceptually sure; but size-wise they are so different as to warrant valid questions about ROI.

Chicago Pile 1 ran for 12 years, ITER started ~12 years ago and plans to run into the 2030s at least. Budget and headcount would likely be vastly different too, I’d welcome any educated guesses. Sometimes quantity has a quality of its own, as they say.

[myrmidon]

Sure but those are not really equivalent/comparable in scale; just looking at power/size and conceptual distance from commercial viability, the Chicago pile does not even match up to something like SPARC or JET, much less ITER.

A more fitting comparison to ITER would be something like Fermi-1 or other prototype designs at almost commercial scale, IMO, and those were multi-year, large projects too (and fission is much simpler than fusion, which obviously also helps).

[pfdietz]

The X-10 reactor at Argonne went critical less than a year after CP-1, with a power of 500 kW, rising to 4 MW in 1944. The Hanford B reactor, with a power of 250 MW, was in operation less than two years after CP-1 went critical.

[pfdietz]

Correction: the X-10 reactor was at Oak Ridge, not Argonne.