See the problem folks? If the mainstream doesn’t understand the workings of the sun, this is money down the drain. Thank you, mainstream astrophysicists. How much money? Well, the article claims ITER is a $24 BILLION dollar effort. That’s likely pie in the sky from ITER. Other sources (for example, https://www.newsweek.com/breakthrough-i ... on-1507324 and https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/1 ... 416a/full/ ) say the projected cost will be $45-65 BILLION dollars (which would be nearly 10 times the original projected cost).World's most powerful MAGNET is ready to be shipped to France for a nuclear fusion project that will replicate reactions in the SUN to create 'the ultimate clean energy source'
It was Paul Dabbar, DOE undersecretary for science, who provided the $65 billion estimate to the Senate in April of 2018 and he said that $65 billion only covered construction costs, not operating costs. He’s probably right since before Covid ITER was spending about $2 billion a year leading to the $24 billion figure. Spending however will likely go up towards the end of the project (don't all projects do that?) and in May of 2020 ITER admitted (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... d-pandemic ) that because of COVID they were spending over $1 million per day (that's $3.6 billion a year) with the expectations of higher costs and delays in testing.
And note this … with all that cost, ITER is still just a experiment to try and understand the physics enough to produce more power than input. ITER claims that a fusion pilot plant will be constructed in the 2035-2040 timeframe based on the results of this experiment and that the first generation of commercial fusion power plants will be online by 2040 to 2050 (30 years from now). But when have the fusion seekers ever met a schedule? In fact, DEMO is what ITER calls the machine that will be built next and which will lead to a commercial prototype. But DEMO actually describes several machines (all most like bigger than ITER!) built by individual countries. And the people outside ITER are only talking about demonstrating industrial fusion electricity by 2050. Not building commercial power plants as ITER claims. The reality is that the DEMO phase might likely last till 2060 with perhaps four countries building $100 billion dollar plus machines (the race for fusion). Then they have to build the prototypes of the commercial plants … another 10 years and $100 billion, each? ALL based on the assumption that they actually understand the sun.
And by the way, ITER talks about 50 megawatts in / 500 MW out for the ITER experiment … but the 50 MW in is power (electricity) to heat hydrogen and the out is heat … not electricity (power) output. Thus, there’s a lot of deception going on here by ITER … by basically the same crowd who control astrophysics and particle physics. Even though the above lie has been pointed out repeatedly (even as early as 2006), ITER's proponents are still telling the lie to the public. For example, here’s (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-08/ ... e/12114948 ) a 2020 article quoting an expert in the nuclear community saying "ITER consumes 50 megawatts of power to produce this plasma at 150 million degrees, and the goal is to produce 500 megawatts of power from that plasma.” Well it won’t because 500 MW of heat is NOT 500 MW of power. In fact, ITER will NOT even break even despite all claims to the contrary by those who sold a gullible public the program (see http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/iter/IT ... eactor.pdf).
It’s all one huge incestuous boondoggle that YOU will be paying for a long time.
All of it likely based on a misunderstanding about the way the sun works.