Last month, as expected, the four partners in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project announced a three-year extension of the ITER engineering design activity. Detailed design work on the next-generation fusion-energy device started in 1992 and has cost about $1 bn so far. A decision to build the device, once scheduled to be taken this year, will now be made in 2001 at the earliest. The ITER council said that the extension would “provide the framework for undertaking jointly site(s)-specific and other activities with the aim of enabling future decision on construction and operation of ITER”. What the project is really doing is buying time as it tries to find a cheaper option that the partners will find acceptable. The US is keen to cut the project’s cost by two-thirds.
ITER is a joint effort by the European Union, Japan, Russia and the US to develop a giant tokamak that would use magnetic fields to confine a burning plasma of deuterium and tritium. Current tokamaks are approaching “breakeven” – the point at which the fusion reactions in the plasma release as much energy as is used to heat and maintain the plasma. ITER is geared towards reaching the next stage: the ignition of a burning plasma. Ignition requires the fusion reactions to release about five times the energy needed to maintain the plasma. The role of ITER is to ensure that all of the physics and technology issues associated with a burning plasma are understood, and the ITER council is confident that the four partners have designed a reactor capable of this. The problem is money.
The decision has disappointed fusion enthusiasts in Europe, but was inevitable given the circumstances of the other three partners. It has long been known that Russia has little to contribute to ITER besides brain power, while Japan, enthusiastic in the past, has recently encountered economic problems. The US, meanwhile, has become increasingly opposed to ITER in its current form for a variety of political and technical reasons. These have ensured that the US fusion budget continues to remain below the levels recommended by a series of high-level review panels. (Europe spends about twice as much on fusion as the US, and Japan three times as much.) American politicians are reluctant to fund a facility that will be built overseas, while the inertial-confinement lobby in the powerful weapons labs argues that it is too early to commit to the magnetic-confinement route to fusion. In inertial-confinement fusion – which is currently funded for defence rather than energy reasons – laser or ion beams are used to heat and confine the plasma.
Although the US has undoubtedly undermined ITER, the project’s leaders could learn from recent events there. It is widely accepted that plans to increase the US science budget are due, at least in part, to a united lobbying effort by more than 100 societies representing scientists and engineers. ITER’s profile, on the other hand, has been remarkably low for a project that hoped to spend anything between $6.3 bn and $11.4 bn of taxpayers’ money. ITER must start by convincing the fusion community, and then the wider science and engineering community, of its merits if it is to stand any chance with politicians and the public. The fact that fusion (and fission) hardly feature in the current debates about global warming and climate change is a sign that a lot of work remains to be done.
How bad is a three-year delay? It is certainly bad news for the physicists and engineers working on the project, although it could well provide a reason to keep existing fusion experiments running. However, it is important to realize that ITER was meant to be followed by a demonstration reactor capable of generating electricity and then, about 50 years from now, a commercial fusion power plant. There can be no doubt that new sources of energy will be needed by then. Whether three years is long enough for the ITER partners to convince the world that it really will lead to, in the words of the ITER council, “a virtually limitless, environmentally attractive and economically competitive source of energy”, remains to be seen.
