ITER in trouble?

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@ix.netcom.com>]

Anyone have any insight or opinion regarding this article on the 
probability of a successful ITER development project? If the 10 
billion dollar price tag is accurate, and based on past experiences, 
I doubt this, the question remains, how can a successful conclusion 
result in economical energy for our future generations? If it is 
economical, will it be something that won't be evident for many 
decades in the future. I am not questioning the reasoning for such an 
undertaking. I'm just wondering whether or not this is nothing more 
than another "Star Wars" project.
-----------------------------
WASHINGTON,  -- An international physics project budgeted 
for $10 billion may not work, warn two Texas physicists. 
Their doubts, described Thursday in a news report in the journal 
Science, have stirred controversy among the U.S., Russian, European
and Japanese scientists cooperating on the International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reactor (ITER) but the doubts have not convinced
everyone. 

Planners hope the giant donut-shaped reactor, once built, will be 
able to get up enough energy to ignite the world's first controlled,
self-sustaining fusion burn. They hope to blast out 1.5 billion watts,
proving that controlled nuclear fusion could be an abundant, reliable
source of energy. 

ITER is still in a six-year design phase, and the countries involved 
have not made a decision about whether to go ahead with the project or
where to locate it if it is built. 
 No one has yet built such a big donut reactor, called a tokamak, as 
the one planned for ITER. Using a new method of predicting turbulence
in a huge reactor, physicists William Dorland and Michael
Kotschenreuther of the University of Texas at Austin see trouble. 
 According to their analysis, the giant project will kick up such 
disturbances in the hot gasses inside that it would put out only a few
times the amount of energy it sucked in for heating. 
The alarming calculations have not stopped the project.

Anne Davies, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's office of fusion research,
told Science that the physicists' new analysis was ``a nice piece of
work'' but that ``it's not a complete piece of work yet.'' 

The skeptical physicists will be asked to continue their studies and  
review the next phase of ITER's design. However Science quotes Davies
as saying, ``I'm still personally feeling fairly confident that ITER's
designs will achieve ignition.'' 

Sandy Perle
Director, Technical Operations
ICN Dosimetry Division
Office: (800) 548-5100 Ext. 2306 
Fax: (714) 668-3149

E-Mail: sandyfl@ix.netcom.com    

Homepages:

http://www.netcom.com/~sandyfl/home.html
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/1205