The multi-national, multi-billion-dollar, multi-decadal ITER fusion energy project has hit another snag, adding significantly to its estimated cost and time of arrival. Bloomberg reported June 22, “The world’s biggest fusion experiment involving 35 nations faces new delays and potentially billions of dollars in extra costs after defective pieces and broken supply chains disrupted the reactor’s construction in southern France.”
The week before the meeting, Scientific American reported, “ITER is on the verge of a record-setting disaster as accumulated schedule slips and budget overruns threaten to make it the most delayed—and most cost-inflated—science project in history.” The article by veteran science writer (and mathematician) and NYU journalism professor Charles Seife dove into internal ITER documents he obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed this year. The documents were originally prepared a year ago for an ITER council meeting.
The documents, Seife wrote, show that “at the time, the project was bracing for a three-year delay—a doubling of internal estimates prepared just six months earlier. And in the year since those documents were written, the already grim news out of ITER has unfortunately only gotten worse. Yet no one within the ITER Organization has been able to provide estimates of the additional delays, much less the extra expenses expected to result from them. Nor has anyone at the U.S. Department of Energy, which is in charge of the nation’s contributions to ITER, been able to do so. When contacted for this story, DOE officials did not respond to any questions by the time of publication.”
ITER (Latin for “the path” and originally the “International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor”) issued an intentionally bland news release June 22, following the meeting of its governing council at the headquarters in St Paul-Lez-Durance. Bloomberg parsed the press statement and focused on its statement that the council “requested the Director-General to continue moving forward expeditiously with preparation of the updated project baseline proposal for review and approval in 2024,” The review and approval of the baseline for the Tokamak magnetic confinement project was originally scheduled for 2023, Bloomberg noted.
ITER had its beginning in 1978 as a proposal for an international program to develop a Tokomak fusion project. While the project moved forward with little attention beyond technical circles, it burst upon the public scene during the 1985 Geneva summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
In Geneva, the two major world leaders agreed to cooperate on fusion R&D, issuing a statement that said that “the potential importance of the work aimed at utilizing controlled thermonuclear fusion for peaceful purposes and, in this connection, advocated the widest practicable development of international cooperation in obtaining this source of energy, which is essentially inexhaustible, for the benefit of all mankind.” Reagan then touted the collaboration in a joint session of the U.S. Congress.
The U.S. than had an on-again, off-again relationship with the project as it began to put together what became ITER. The U.S. pulled out of the planning in 1998, complaining that the projected $10 billion cost was excessive. When the planners scaled back to effort to $5 billion in 2002, the U.S. rejoined.
Officially launched in 2006, ITER is funded and run by seven member parties: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The United Kingdom participates through EU‘s Fusion for Energy (F4E), Switzerland participates through Euratom and F4E, and the project has cooperation agreements with Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan and Thailand. Europe provides about 45% of the ITER funding.
ITER was originally funded at $6 billion, with an estimated date for fusion demonstration of 10 years. The current official cost estimate is $22 billion, although several unofficial estimates are in the $30-$45 billion range. The current operational estimate is 2025, although that figure appears to be fantasy.
According to the documents Seife obtained, ITER in November 2021 was already looking at a 17-month delay. “By the time of the June 2022 ITER Council meeting,” he wrote, “the number had doubled to roughly 35 months of delays—enough to easily add billions of dollars to ITER’s already bloated budget. But this timeline didn’t reflect other events bound to introduce even more delays.”
The project faces supply chain delays, faulty thermal shields, and manufacturing flaws that are out of specifications, according to Laban Coblentz, ITER’s communications chief.
The project also faces regulatory problems with the French Nuclear Safety Authority, which ordered ITER to stop assembling the fusion reactor in January 2022, raising doubts about the adequacy of the radiation shielding designed to protect workers. In its understated press release following the council meeting, ITER said updating the timeline will require “Close and effective engagement with the French regulator, Autorité de sûreté nucléaire (ASN), regarding their questions related to the machine assembly ‘hold point,’ and ensuring mutual alignment on the way forward.”
“With each passing decade, this record-breaking monument to big international science looks less and less like a cathedral—and more like a mausoleum.” — Journalist Charles Seife
In his Scientific American article, Seife suggested that ITER has come to resemble a Gothic cathedral: “a beautiful but immensely complex structure that we pray will help us find salvation from our energy and climate woes.”
Then he rejected that metaphor, concluding, “With each passing decade, this record-breaking monument to big international science looks less and less like a cathedral—and more like a mausoleum.”
–Kennedy Maize