ITER Deep In The......

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Mon Jun 07, 2010 9:57 am

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http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives ... tdown.html

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Money Troubles. Possible cancellation.

Stoney3K · Post by **Stoney3K** » Tue Jun 08, 2010 12:04 pm

This could mean serious improvements and peer reviews for Polywell tech.

Remember, ITER is backed up by tons of university research projects, including material sciences, plasma physics and electrical engineering.

If ITER is going to be cancelled, these projects will need to find a new 'target' and a testbed to run their experiments on. Some universities already have a fusor on campus, and have more than enough resources to convert it into a Polywell or construct a new one from scratch.

Furthermore, it will probably shatter the public's confidence in tokamak-based fusion systems, and strengthen the search for 'alternative' options, which could mean more Polywell support.

KitemanSA · Post by **KitemanSA** » Tue Jun 08, 2010 1:27 pm

Oh, Lord, NO! The last thing we need is for that hoard of academic wolves to descend on Polywell and make it as bloated and ineffectual as tokamak research.

TallDave · Post by **TallDave** » Tue Jun 08, 2010 2:28 pm

ITER is good science, bad economics. It's not the energy solution for 2160. 2110 is unlikely. It's way too expensive for the state of our welfare states.

GIThruster · Post by **GIThruster** » Tue Jun 08, 2010 3:04 pm

"The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people's money."

Margaret Thatcher

Stoney3K · Post by **Stoney3K** » Tue Jun 08, 2010 3:48 pm

TallDave wrote:ITER is good science, bad economics. It's not the energy solution for 2160. 2110 is unlikely. It's way too expensive for the state of our welfare states.

True. I'm still betting a keg of beer on the fact that we can get 500MW of fusion to grid before the first bucket of concrete for ITER is being poured.

(Which, in turn, would make ITER totally useless.)

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Tue Jun 08, 2010 4:18 pm

Stoney3K wrote:
TallDave wrote:ITER is good science, bad economics. It's not the energy solution for 2160. 2110 is unlikely. It's way too expensive for the state of our welfare states.
True. I'm still betting a keg of beer on the fact that we can get 500MW of fusion to grid before the first bucket of concrete for ITER is being poured.

(Which, in turn, would make ITER totally useless.)

My guess is that ITER is headed for cancellation.

AcesHigh · Post by **AcesHigh** » Tue Jun 08, 2010 6:54 pm

the website from the link in the first post seems to be offline...

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Tue Jun 08, 2010 7:04 pm

AcesHigh wrote:the website from the link in the first post seems to be offline...

Works for me. Maybe your ISP has a faulty DNS table or something.

kcdodd · Post by **kcdodd** » Tue Jun 08, 2010 11:37 pm

Iter has science behind it. So far polywell has hopes and dreams. Take note, iter cancellation would be a bad thing, not a good one.

KitemanSA · Post by **KitemanSA** » Wed Jun 09, 2010 12:05 am

kcdodd wrote:Iter has science behind it. So far polywell has hopes and dreams. Take note, iter cancellation would be a bad thing, not a good one.

I am not yet willing to call Dr. Nebel and the review panel charletans. Let us just say that ITER has published science, Polywell has PUBLISHED hope and dreams. This leaves to the reader the question of whether that reader thinks there is UNPUBLISHED science behind the published hope and dreams.

kcdodd · Post by **kcdodd** » Wed Jun 09, 2010 12:15 am

I'm not calling them charlatans. I am saying there is science already shown to say iter would probably work as it is planned to. We simply don't know if a polywell can work as planned, simply because it's never been done on any scale. Iter has been done on a smaller scale many times.

TallDave · Post by **TallDave** » Wed Jun 09, 2010 12:59 am

Hey now, be fair -- Polywell has some real science behind it, fifteen years from Bussard's team and a few from Nebel's. And there was a whole series of WB machines before WB-7 and WB-8, so it's not like there aren't any small scale results. Sure, WB-9 is much less likely to work as hoped than ITER, but then ITER has zero chance of doing anything practically useful.

Anyways, science is about trial and error. Polywell may be an error, but that's how we learn.

Given abundant resources, I'd be happy to see both fullly funded. Given scarce resources... why starve other plausible concepts to throw another $20B at toks when we know the economics don't work? Reverse field configuration, Polywell, steampunk fusion, even dense plasma focus... there's a shot one or more of those might be a real power source in a world that's hungry for energy.

kcdodd · Post by **kcdodd** » Wed Jun 09, 2010 3:18 am

I am not saying don't research polywell. I am saying that iter is the best shot we have at showing net fusion energy is possible by humans, and to not build it would mean we really don't take fusion energy seriously. What if polywell is a flop and iter is never built? Then we have nothing.

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Wed Jun 09, 2010 4:46 am

kcdodd wrote:I am not saying don't research polywell. I am saying that iter is the best shot we have at showing net fusion energy is possible by humans, and to not build it would mean we really don't take fusion energy seriously. What if polywell is a flop and iter is never built? Then we have nothing.

Actually we have 20 or 30 serious alternatives being researched.