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FUSION REACTOR: ITER Costs Give Partners Pause
By Daniel Clery
Science

Friday, June 27, 2008

Last week, ITER scientists revealed a new cost estimate for the multibillion-dollar fusion reactor that was 30% higher than earlier calculations. Now the project's seven international partners must decide whether they can afford it.

ITER, or the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is designed to show conclusively that fusing together hydrogen isotopes at extreme temperatures--the process that powers the sun--can be harnessed on Earth as a practical energy source. Fifteen years of discussion and experiment led in 2001 to a "final" design for the 20,000-ton ITER reactor, twice the size in linear dimensions of the world's current largest. Since then, the partners--China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States--have chosen Cadarache in southern France as a site and set up the organization that will build the reactor (Science, 13 October 2006, p. 238).

The current price tag is €10 billion, half of which will pay for construction. Last week, the project's governing council met in Aomori, Japan, to hear about a new review of that 2001 design that includes numerous refinements and upgrades to components, including magnets and heating systems, plus additional magnets to help control explosive discharges at the plasma edge (Science, 13 June, p. 1405). Those design changes will cost an extra €1.2 billion to €1.6 billion, ITER managers estimate, and the council immediately ordered an independent assessment of the costs in time for its next meeting in November. In the meantime, the council did approve a 2-year delay, to 2018, in the expected start-up of the reactor.

Fusion experts say that it's notoriously hard to keep such large projects within budget. "When they actually go out and build things, they always cost more," says Stephen Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, a lobby group in Gaithersburg, Maryland. But ITER scientists believe that the design changes are crucial to the project's chance of success and that the partners should approve the new cost estimate. "It will define what we can do and when we can do it," says David Campbell, assistant head of ITER's department of fusion science and technology. It won't be an easy sell, however: Some ITER partner governments won't be happy at being asked to fork out more.

The panel tasked with assessing the new cost estimate will be led by Frank Briscoe, former operations director of the JET fusion reactor near Oxford, U.K. The European Union, which as host must bear nearly 50% of the cost, declined comment on the new estimate beyond saying, in the words of research spokesperson Catherine Ray, that "we're happy [Briscoe's] group has been set up." Meanwhile, the partners in the world's most expensive experiment will be debating its future. "There will be some very, very hard diplomatic negotiations over what the partners are prepared to pay," says a senior European researcher who asked not to be named.

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