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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