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Projects and facilities

Projects and facilities

Time for big decisions

10 Mar 2004

Decisions taken this year will have a major impact on the shape of the global physics landscape for the next two decades. Discussions about the International Linear Collider (ILC) have just started in earnest and a decision on which technology to use is expected by the end of this year. Meanwhile, Japan and the EU are still trying to convince the other partners in the ITER fusion project of the relative merits of building the $5bn facility at Rokkasho-Mura and the French town of Cadarache.


A decision on ITER had been expected last December and again last month, but deadlock prevailed – as it has before. A decade ago the EU, Japan and US were unable to decide where to locate the ITER engineering-design activities, with the result that the work was split between Garching, Naka and La Jolla. There has been talk of something similar happening again – such as the tokamak and the control room being on different sites – but such a compromise should not be repeated.

A more meaningful consolation prize would be hosting IFMIF – an accelerator-based neutron source that will be used to check if materials are suitable for use in a fusion reactor. However, plans for IFMIF are still at an early stage, so it may not be available as the silver medal in the fusion Olympics. Logic dictates that ITER should be located an existing fusion lab, such as Cadarache, rather than at a green-field site like Rokkasho, but logic does not always prevail in such situations.

The ILC and ITER decisions are linked in that Japan is unlikely to be able to afford both – especially as it is already spending $1.5bn on the J-PARC accelerator complex. The US is not in the running to host ITER, even though the fusion experiment is the Department of Energy’s (DOE) top near-term priority in its 20 year plan for new facilities. However, the US would like to host the linear collider, which is the highest mid-term priority for the DOE. This might explain American support for Japan as the site for ITER, although the US could also be extracting revenge for French opposition to the war in Iraq.

Once the ITER and ILC decisions have been taken, there is still an impressive array of other projects in physics and astronomy waiting to be funded. The German government, for instance, has promised to pay 75% of the cost of a new accelerator for nuclear physics in Darmstadt and 50% of a free-electron laser in Hamburg, but is expecting other European countries to fund the rest. In the US, meanwhile, most of the 28 projects in the DOE’s 20 year plan are physics-based, although many are upgrades to existing facilities. Astronomers are also working on plans for telescopes with diameters of 30 m and larger.

Not all of these projects will be funded – and that is how it should be. It is essential that there are always more good projects than there are funds available, and that only the best ones get built – and get built in the best place.

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