US Omnibus Budget Bill Doubled Funding for ITER, Avoiding Reactor Prototype Delays

The United States has agreed to double its planned 2018 budget contribution to the ITER project to build a prototype nuclear fusion reactor, avoiding delays to the international project this year, its director said on Monday.

Washington cut the United States’ 2017 contribution from a scheduled $105 million to $50 million and had planned to cut its 2018 contribution from a scheduled $120 million to $63 million.

But in last-minute talks about the U.S. 2018 budget last week, the U.S. Congress approved a draft Omnibus Spending Bill with a $122 million in-kind contribution for ITER, which President Donald Trump signed into law on Friday, ITER said.

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Lockheed's Fusion Reactor Research has First Plasma

Lockheed Martin continues to invest in its portable nuclear fusion generator, with that investment recently entering a more advanced stage, according to the head of the company’s Skunk Works division.

Rob Weiss told an audience at the Atlantic Council that Lockheed is “about four months into a little bit more significant investment” into the technology, which was first revealed around two years ago.

At the time of the initial announcement, Lockheed said it was aiming for a 100 megawatt device which could fit on the back of a large truck. Such a reactor, the company claims, could power a city of up to 100,000 people.

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ITER Woes Continue: French Based International Fusion Power Plant Prototype Delayed Six Years

The multibillion-dollar ITER fusion project will take another 6 years to build beyond the—now widely discredited—official schedule, a meeting of the governing council was told this week. ITER management has also asked the seven international partners backing the project for additional funding to finish the job.

It remains unclear whether the project will get what it wants: Delegations from the partners—China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States—concluded the council meeting today by announcing the council would conduct its own review of the schedule and funding to look for ways to tighten them up. In the meantime, the council approved the proposed schedule for 2016 and 2017, set out milestones for the project to reach in that time, and agreed to make available extra resources to help achieve it. After consulting their governments, the delegations committed themselves to agreeing on a final schedule at the next council meeting, in June 2016.

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US Costs for ITER Fusion Reactor Grows Enormously

ITER, the international fusion experiment under construction in Cadarache, France, aims to prove that nuclear fusion is a viable power source by creating a "burning plasma" that produces more energy than the machine itself consumes. Although that goal is at least 20 years away, ITER is already burning through money at a prodigious pace. The United States is only a minor partner in the project, which began construction in 2008. But the U.S. contribution to ITER will total $3.9 billion—roughly four times as much as originally estimated—according to a new cost estimate released yesterday. That is about $1.4 billion higher than a 2011 cost estimate, and the numbers are likely to intensify doubts among some members of Congress about continuing the U.S. involvement in the project.

The United States and ITER share a complicated history. The project was first proposed in 1985 as a joint venture with the Soviet Union and Japan. The United States backed out of that effort in 1998, citing concerns over cost and feasibility—only to jump in again in 2003. At the time, ITER was envisioned to cost roughly $5 billion. That estimate had grown to $12 billion by 2006, when the European Union, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and United States signed a formal agreement to build the device. The United States agreed, essentially, to build 9% of the parts for the reactor, at whatever price was necessary.

ITER was supposed to start running by 2016. Since then, however, the project has been plagued by delays, cost increases, and management problem. ITER is now expected to cost at least $21 billion and won't turn on until 2020 at the earliest. And a recent review slammed ITER's management.

The cost of the U.S. contribution has increased, too, although by how much has been unclear. Officials with U.S. ITER had not released an updated cost profile for several years, until Ned Sauthoff, project manager for U.S. ITER at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, did so yesterday. Speaking to a meeting of the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee in Rockville, Maryland, Sauthoff reported that the total cost of the U.S. contribution would be $3.9 billion by the time the project is done in 2034. The schedule assumes that ITER won't start running until 2024 or 2025. In comparison, an April 2011 funding profile pegged the cost of U.S. ITER at $2.5 billion.

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ITER Fusion Project Gets Slammed by Review

ITER, the international fusion reactor project in France, is reeling from an assessment that found serious problems with the project’s leadership, management, and governance. The report is so damning, Science has learned, that after a 13 February special session that reviewed and accepted the report’s conclusions and recommendations, the ITER Council—the project’s governing body—restricted its readership to a small number of senior managers and council members. “We feared that if [the assessment] leaked to people who don’t know about the ITER agreement, the project could be interpreted as a major failure, which is not what the management assessor intended,” says nuclear engineer Bob Iotti of the consulting firm CH2M HILL, who chairs that council.

Backed by China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States, ITER aims to build a testbed for fusion energy. Under construction at Cadarache in southern France, it is often described as the most complex machine ever built. In its cavernous doughnut-shaped vacuum vessel, the reactor will heat heavy hydrogen to 150 million °C so that the nuclei will fuse to form helium, releasing energy.

Since the project began in earnest in 2006, the expected completion date has slipped from 2016 to 2018 to 2020, the estimated cost has tripled to at least €16 billion, and there’s been a major change of leadership. “ITER had to create a project, a design, a laboratory, and an institutional culture. That’s very many things to create at once,” says Steve Cowley, head of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in the United Kingdom.

The ITER agreement requires management assessments every 2 years. The previous two were critical, but nothing like the latest, conducted by Bill Madia, former director of the Pacific Northwest and Oak Ridge national laboratories. “It didn’t mince words,” Iotti says. “It could be read as an indictment of the current director general [Osamu Motojima], but one should also look at the obstacles in his path. Some are not under his control.”

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The Other Big Fusion Push: ITER...and its delays

Delays in the installation of key parts of ITER, a multibillion-euro international nuclear-fusion experiment, are forcing scientists to change ITER’s research programme to focus exclusively on the key goal of generating power by 2028. As a result, much research considered non-essential to the target, including some basic physics and studies of plasmas aimed at better understanding industrial-scale fusion, will be postponed.

Nature has learned that the plans form the main thrust of recommendations by a 21-strong expert panel of international plasma scientists and ITER staff, convened to reassess the project’s research plan in the light of the construction delays. The plans were discussed this week at a meeting of ITER’s Science and Technology Advisory Committee (STAC).

The meeting is the start of a year-long review by ITER to try to keep the experiment on track to generate 500 MW of power from an input of 50 MW by 2028, and so hit its target of attaining the so-called Q ≥ 10, where power output is ten times input or more.

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It would appear to be 20 years ahead of the ICF folks though.  Unless that seret project Lockheed has been talking about is an ICF.