Plan for ITER fusion project wins review panel’s blessing,

At one of the most critical times in its history, the ITER fusion project’s governing council met to discuss the revised schedule and cost put forward last year by the project’s management. Not for the first time, the ITER Organization—since early last year led by French nuclear physicist Bernard Bigot—had asked for more time, more staff, and more money. From the carefully worded statement released after yesterday’s meeting, it is clear that the project’s members—China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States—have accepted the management’s plan. All that remains is to work out how to pay for it.

ITER, a roughly $20 billion international project that is the largest attempt so far to show that generating energy by fusing atoms together is at least scientifically feasible, has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. It has been 30 years in gestation, but its site in Cadarache, France, is now abuzz with construction, and the components of its gigantic reactor are arriving from around the world. When the construction agreement was signed 10 years ago, ITER was due to be finished this year at a cost around a third of current estimates. The latest proposed schedule has the reactor’s “first plasma”—the point at which hydrogen is first heated inside hot enough to ionize it into plasma—occurring in 2025.

The continually moving target of completion is causing patience to wear thin among some of the members. The U.S. Senate, for example, has repeatedly cut ITER funding from recent budget markups only to relent in negotiation with the more enthusiastic House of Representatives. Some other members are understood to be equally frustrated. The timing of this week’s meeting is particularly sensitive because the U.S. Department of Energy is preparing to release a report next week detailing its arguments for staying in the project or not.

The ITER council has declined to release any details of the proposed schedule or cost apart from the first plasma deadline of 2025. Following its last meeting in November 2015, the council asked a group of independent experts to review the management’s proposal. Today, Bigot told Science that the expert group deemed the proposed timeline the “best technically achievable schedule,” meaning that ITER could conceivably be finished in that time. This gives the organization “a green light to move forward,” Bigot says. “We’re working hard to present a comprehensive picture in time for the next ITER council in June.”

It’s unclear how many extra resources the ITER organization has asked for, but this calculation does not include any of the hardware of the reactor which is being provided in-kind by all the member states. Instead, it concerns the cash contributions members must make to the management to pay for the intricate job of managing the flow of deliveries and putting all the pieces of the reactor together. The previous schedule had predicted first plasma in 2019 or 2020, so a large part of the extra cost will be running the organization for another 5 or 6 years.

The time at ITER headquarters between now and the June council meeting will be spent trying to work out how to keep to the agreed schedule, bearing in mind the money the different members agree to make available and their diverse budgeting cycles. “There is now a credible estimate of the schedule and cost envelope with respect to the financial capabilities of all the members,” Bigot says. “All the pieces are in place to make a decision.”