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Energy Department Pulls Plug on Princeton Fusion Experiment
By Richard Monastersky
The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Washington - The Department of Energy announced today that it was terminating a major fusion-energy experiment under construction at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a national center located at Princeton University.

Budgeted at $100-million, the project is called the National Compact Stellarator Experiment, or NCSX, and was supposed to open in July 2009. But recent estimates indicate that costs have ballooned to $170-million and that construction would not be completed until 2013.

In a written statement, Raymond L. Orbach, the department's under secretary for science, said that "budget increases, schedule delays, and continuing uncertainties of the NCSX construction project necessitate its closure."

Mr. Orbach said that killing the NCSX would ensure that one of the lab's existing projects, called the Spherical Torus experiment, would remain "at the forefront of fusion-science research in the world well into the future." The goal of fusion research is to come up with a device that will demonstrate the feasibility of generating limitless amounts of electricity from nuclear fusion, the energy source of stars.

The main focus of future fusion research is the ITER reactor, which is under construction in France. But budget problems have caused the United States to cut its planned support for the project, along with other major scientific efforts, such as the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Earlier this month, the American Nobel laureates in physics sent a letter to President Bush, asking him to support supplemental funds for ITER and other basic-science research.

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