The Dish

Raffi Khatchadourian traveled to France to visit an unfinished reactor intended to produce thermonuclear energy by reaching temperatures “more than ten times as hot as the sun at its blazing core”:

No one knows [the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor]’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes ITER the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth. But if it is truly possible to bottle up a star, and to do so economically, the technology could solve the world’s energy problems for the next thirty million years, and help save the planet from environmental catastrophe. Hydrogen, a primordial element, is the most abundant atom in the universe, a potential fuel that poses little risk of scarcity. Eventually, physicists hope, commercial reactors modelled on ITER will be built, too—generating terawatts of power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste. The reactor would run on no more than seawater and lithium. It would never melt down. It would realize a yearning, as old as the story of Prometheus, to bring the light of the heavens to Earth, and bend it to humanity’s will. ITER, in Latin, means “the way.”

But the reactor hit its latest snag this summer, after repeated delays:

In the previous year, ITER had met barely half its goals. The latest target date for turning on the machine—2020—was again slipping. Officials were now quietly talking about 2023 or 2024. What if the schedule continued to slide? Engineers operate in a world of strictly measured loads and heat fluxes, but political forces are impervious to precise measurement. Still, the ultimate repercussions were obvious: there would come a point, eventually, when frustrated politicians decided that ITER was simply not worth the increasing expense of delay.

In June, the ITER Council gathered in Tokyo, and it was evident that the organization was grappling with its own inner turbulence. At one point, the council member from Korea picked up his papers and stormed out. Ned Sauthoff, the U.S. project manager, bluntly made it known that he thought the project’s nuclear-safety culture was lacking. America’s involvement was growing more tenuous. The Department of Energy had cut funding for a tokamak at M.I.T. to help pay for ITER, and the decision had familiar implications; members of Congress were invited to view the inert machine, and they returned to the Hill expressing outrage. (“ITER is going to eat our whole domestic program.”) Official estimates of the U.S. contribution had doubled, to a billion dollars, and then rose again, to $2.4 billion, merely to get to “first plasma”—essentially, just turning on the machine. Before summer’s end, Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate subcommittee that handles appropriations for energy development, announced that she would discontinue all funding for ITER until the Department of Energy provided a detailed assessment of the total American financial commitment. The request was both logical and impossible to answer accurately; even people at ITER did not know. The department was reluctant to provide a number, and [Ned] Sauthoff told me, “We are in unknown territory.”

Update from a reader:

A somewhat more hopeful example of the pursuit of fusion is the National Ignition Facility here in the States. As I understand it – and I am only an observer from the wings – the Dep’t of Energy largely threw its chips in with this plan for producing and capturing fusion energy, which involves compressing supercooled hydrogen with powerful lasers, rather than superheating it with huge electrical jolts, to create Sun-like conditions. There was big news from the NIF earlier this month: the first energy-positive firings, where more energy came out than went in. Not an end by any means, but a start. A really solid and sober report on NIF is here.

Also too, the thing looks badass.

Update from a reader:

As a physicist working on magnetically confined fusion (but not working on the Iter project), I think the piece gives an unfair view of the project. The US involvement in it has been nothing but trouble: when the Iter project was first considered to be built in the end of ’90s, with major US involvement, it was brought to a halt when US suddenly withdrew support. It took more than 10 years to reconsolidate funding, with additional reductions in design specifications and budget (the original design was decidedly badass, as a sure-fire approach). Currently the US has a 9% stake in the project (like India, Russia, Korea, China and Japan), while the EU funds 45% of it. EU and Japan have an additional bilateral agreement on additional funding for supporting projects such as the IFMIF project. So, the US involvement currently is at best marginal. Is this the best we can do?

While any approach to fusion research is important, I think your reader’s evaluation of the NIF project is lacking. The energy produced in this instance is compared to the energy delivered to the fusion fuel pellet, not total energy used to power the machine. The lasers are about 8% efficient, can be fired about three times per day (when they can), and are used for indirect drive by producing a plasma around the pellet. This means that the energy delivered to the fuel pellet is a tiny fraction of the total, so as a power plant it’s a bust. It does give great insights on what’s happening in a thermonuclear explosion, and appropriately about 5% of the research is highly classified. Not really a fair comparison.

If the Iter fails due to politics and bureaucracy, fusion will be set back probably at least several decades. While it has a lot of detractors, the tokamak is basically the only device so far that has come near engineering break-even, and Iter is projected to produce about 10 times as much as it takes in. Some of the criticism is valid, but it’s still our best shot. Let’s not ruin it.

A new report from the Center for American Progress finds that gun violence could soon become the leading cause of death among young people:

In 2010, 6,201 young people between the ages of 15 and 24 died by gunfire. Guns were a close second to the leading cause of death among this age group, car accidents, which took the lives of 7,024 young people that year. But, while car accident deaths among young people have been steadily declining over the past decade, gun deaths have remained relatively unchanged. And, as described in a new Center for American Progress report [pdf] released Friday, if current trends continue, gun deaths will surpass car accident deaths among young people sometime in 2015[.]

Zara Kessler reads the report and adds some context:

More than half — 54 percent — of Americans murdered with guns in 2010 were younger than 30. Among 15- to 24-year-olds murdered with guns, 65 percent were black. Adulthood not delayed, but stolen. In addition, in 2010, 33,519 individuals ages 17 to 29 survived being intentionally shot. Disabilities, physical and emotional scars – those last for life.

Low levels of household formation among young Americans may be a troubling portent for the nation’s financial health. But not nearly as disturbing as the annual loss of more than 1 million years of potential life due to gun deaths. (Quite a few unformed households, to say the least.)

Because young people also perpetrate a substantial portion of gun violence, millennial lives are destroyed on both sides of the muzzle. In 2012, people under 29 accounted for about two-thirds of arrests on weapons offenses. Almost 5,000 12- to 24-year-olds were arrested in 2011 for homicides, and guns were implicated in about 70 percent of the murders. It costs taxpayers (who have already paid to educate the perpetrators) about $2 million to imprison someone for life beginning in his or her late teens. Not much economic stimulus there.

In one of his trademark takedowns, Chait explains why the Republican party can’t seem to coalesce around their own version of Obamacare:

Lots of people treat the Republican Party’s inability to unify around an alternative health-care plan, four years after the passage ofthe Affordable Care Act, as some kind of homework assignment they keep procrastinating on. But the problem isn’t that Cantor and Boehner and Ryan would rather lay around on the sofa drinking beer and playing video games than write their health-care plan already. It’s that there’s no plan out there that is both ideologically acceptable to conservatives and politically defensible.

Carping from the sidelines is a great strategy for Republicans because status quo bias is extremely powerful. It lets them highlight the downside of every trade-off without owning any downside of their own. They can vaguely promise to solve any problem with the status quo ante without exposing themselves to the risk any real reform entails. Republicans can exploit the disruption of the transition to Obamacare unencumbered by the reality that their own plans are even more disruptive.

I know we’re all supposed to be used to this by now, and regard it as the way politics works, but seriously: is there a more glaring example of the subordination of the public good to opportunistic factionalism? The GOP acts as if its only goal is to get power, even if it has nothing much to offer about how it would tackle such tough problems as climate change or immigration reform or healthcare when it gets it. They are in this for the electoral game, as Mitch McConnell once famously explained. The rest seems subordinate to that objective. Jonathan Bernstein adds:

Chait mentions that this has been going on for years, but he doesn’t refer to the granddaddy of all “repeal and replace” claims: the op-ed written in early 2010 by House Republican committee chairmen promising not just a bill, but a whole process. They were going to hold hearings, draft a bill and bring it to the House floor. I haven’t checked recently, but last I looked the story was that they hadn’t even bothered with the hearings part. As Chait says, there’s just nothing there.

Looking at the proposals that have come from the GOP so far, Peter Weber says they all have drawbacks:

The CBO analysis for Rep. Young’s bill to raise full-time employment to 40 hours, for example, found that the bill would raise the federal deficit by $74 billion while reducing the number of people getting employer-sponsored health insurance by about a million; about half of those people would go on Medicaid or other public programs, the other half would be uninsured.

It’s not clear the other Republican proposals would be popular in practice, either. Some of them, as the Washington Post editors note, would be better than ObamaCare at holding down health care costs and incentivizing people to buy private health insurance. But they are more disruptive to the status quo — especially post-ObamaCare — and almost all of them would be ripe for articles about sick people losing coverage or watching their health insurance costs skyrocket.

A major cause of the GOP’s ideas deficit is, of course, the Tea Party:

In Jindal’s diatribe, he claimed that Obama is “waving the white flag” on the economy by focusing on executive actions in the face of Congressional gridlock, and took a shot at Obama’s push to raise the minimum wage by decrying his “minimum wage economy.” The evocation of the minimum wage sheds light on the real cause of “polarization.” Here is a policy that is supported by broad majorities, one Republican officials have voted for in the past. Large chunks of Republican voters support it. But as two recent polls showed, Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly oppose the hike, while non-Tea Party Republicans support it. The GOP position is dictated by the Tea Party.