Europe puts brakes on fusion project

[M II A II R II K]

Europe puts brakes on fusion project


November 19, 2009

By Geoff Brumfiel

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...es-on-fusion-p

The European Union (EU) is backing away from a 2018 start date for ITER, a multi-billion-euro fusion reactor under construction in the south of France.

- ITER is a massive experiment to prove the viability of nuclear fusion as a power source. When completed, superconducting magnets will squeeze a plasma of heavy hydrogen isotopes  deuterium and tritium  to temperatures in excess of 150 million �C. The resulting fusion reaction should produce ten times the power consumed in the process of creating the plasma.

- The EU is by far the largest participant in the project. It will pay roughly 45% of the construction costs of ITER, while the other participants  China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States  will each provide roughly 9%. The costs were originally budgeted at around �5 billion (US$7.4 billion) when the agreement to build ITER was signed in 2006, but they are now expected to be roughly double that figure by the time the reactor is built.

ITER WEBSITE

[Codex]

Europe is collabarating on lots of major projects including CERN, ITER, the European Space Agency, European Observatory VLT and European Extremely Large Telescope Project .

NASA has recently had to cut it's spending, and both NASA and the Russians are now having to work more closely with the Europeans in terms of future projects.

Such is the expense of such massive scientific projects.


http://www.eso.org/public/astronomy/...r/paranal.html

http://www.eso.org/public/astronomy/...str/e-elt.html

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html

http://www.eads.com/1024/en/Homepage1024.html

http://www.embl.org/

http://www.diamond.ac.uk/Home.html

http://www.iter.org/default.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science...logy_in_Europe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...logy_in_Europe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...n_Space_Agency



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[Swede]

Sad that this project is delayed. I wonder how much of the needed funding could be freed up if we actually got some CAP-reform? maybe... the missing funding dozens of times over? Thank you agri-buisness. :\