Is The World's Largest Fusion Project Dead?

last week the international thermonuclear experimental reactor or eer announced yet another delay to the world's Flagship project to prove the viability of Fusion Energy and additional 5 billion in extra costs ITA will now not achieve first operation until 2034 almost a decade later than previously planned and some 50 years after the project was first conceived in 1987 I had a bunch of you guys post comments on past videos of mine following this announcement kind of decrying the use of all of this funding on this one project and asking the question should we really keep funding it when there are so many other approaches out there but also so many other problems to solve is eer dead my initial gut reaction to this was of course no we should keep funding it science is good and many nations coming together to fund science even better but if you actually step back and think about it it is kind of a dumb idea bit but before you put me on a rocket and shoot me into the sun to get firsthand experience of the beauty of fusion I'm a physicist by background when I'm not on YouTube I help scientific teams to launch discoveries out of the lab and I help investors back the best scientific teams and breakthroughs that I think can help Society I care about science but I care even more about making it useful reliably and quickly so I want to examine this topic with that hat on if our goal is to get as fast as possible to Fusion is eer still the best way to do it iter has five primary goals number one achieve a uterum tritium Plasma in which the fusion conditions are sustained mostly by internal Fusion heating this is the self- sustaining Fusion reactor we've all been waiting for though eer isn't necessarily going to generate any electricity it's a science and research facility to prove that we can in fact make fusion happen goal number two is to achieve a 10-fold return on power input into the Reactor with 50 megawatt into eer it aims to achieve 500 megaw out that's a Q factor of 10 and beyond that it aims to demonstrate fullscale Fusion operation and test different reactor components for Fusion validate whether tritium a very rare component of the fuel for Fusion can actually be produced in a reactor and demonstrate the safety of fusion operation and act as a kind of General Safe House of fusion knowhow that is why in 1987 the EU the UK Japan the USA Russia later also India China and South Korea teamed up to try and build the biggest Fusion reactor in the world but why the biggest when you are trying to achieve sustained Fusion you are dealing with two competing factors the heat Generation by the plasma to sustain the fusion reaction versus the Heat lost to the environment obviously ideally you want more energy generated than lost so you can use some of that heat and turn it into electricity by powering yes a steam engine it's always a steam engine this becomes easier the bigger the reactor because heat produced scales proportionally to volume which scales according to the radius cubed whereas heat lost scales with the surface area which scales according to R squar that means a reactor twice as big contains eight times as much plasma fusion and generates eight times as much heat energy but the surface area in heat lost is only four times as large so a bigger reactor overall becomes more efficient and so very naturally we all find ourselves shouting the same thing moonshot I'm about to go to the Moon unfortunately 36 years on from the ambitious plan set out by the governments around the world far from breaking records by burning plasma at temperatures 10 times hotter than the center of the Sun eer instead is about to break records for budget overruns and schedule delays iter is spread over many countries partners and many independent service companies within those countries it's a confusing monolithic but also dispersed body of activity in theory this is good because it pump primes expertise around the world in various Fusion capabilities but in reality it's an invitation for a really complicated cat H hering exercise over the decades ITA has been plagued by a string of holdups cost overruns and management issues the original completion date for the first plasma operation was 2016 now it's 2034 the involvement of multiple parties with different manufacturing practices standards and quality has led to the magnets the vacuum vessels the cry stats the blanket modules the diverter components the diagnostic systems the cooling apparatus and various electrical components all needing reordering repurchasing and replacing the decisionmaking process within eer itself often requires consensus among all member countries making it incredibly slow and complex and making controlling the direction and capability of ITA about as effective as paddling the Titanic with a pool noodle may I interest you in a pool noodle as a result there have been several changes in the leadership of eer as it search for an effective management style and strategy the fact is there probably isn't one this organizational complexity is an added burden to maybe the most complex project that Humanity has ever undertaken although the EA project formerly began in 2006 with an estimated $6. 3 billion price tag it's now somewhere in the region of 22 to 27 billion I couldn't quite get a straight answer on whether this includes the additional 5 billion EUR or not which is now scheduled for its first operation in 2034 our question still is does it make sense to keep pushing forward here or is eer dead I want to put that in context relative to the amount of money that private Fusion companies around the world have raised but before I do that I need to thank today's sponsor for making this episode possible aif flow building the largest Fusion reactor is an incredibly challenging task it's at least twice as hard as running a YouTube channel which is why I use akif flow a productivity app for people who want to be better time managers to make sure I don't go over my budget by several billions of dollars unlike some other applications akif flow uses a calendar system to organize all your tasks events and blocks if I create a new task here with a personalized keyboard shortcut let's say scripting a story I can insert it directly into the calendar just like that when I'm researching one of my favorite features is I can create a task straight from the clipboard meaning I don't need to skip a beat when I'm reading through a document after that it's all contained in a to-do list which you can prioritize and insert into your calendar this way I can combine tasks events and time blocks all into one place that's really the peel of akif flow to me it brings everything together in one place in fact you can also integrate all of these other apps to if you are thinking of starting your own creative projects like a YouTube channel or something a bit more simple like building a fusion reactor check out aif flow in the link Down Below in the description now let's get back to the video let's put some things in context from the numbers that I could find the more than 35 private companies developing Fusion approaches around the world have collectively raised $2. 4 billion from private investment and 3.

8 billion from public and government funding which brings the total investment in private Fusion to just over 6. 2 billion $100 million less than the starting cost of eer at 6.