Daniel Grossman is a science journalist
specializing in climate change, in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on
Crisis Reporting.
636

FUSION ENERGY

More delays for ITER, aspartners balk at costs
Review warns that new timeline could still be too optimistic
By Daniel Clery and Adrian Cho

It wasn’t the pat on the back that ITER
officials were looking for. Last week, anindependent review committee delivereda report that was supposed to confirm
that ITER, the troubled international fusion experiment under construction inCadarache, France, finally has come up witha reliable construction schedule and costestimate. But the report says only that thenew date for first operations—2025, 5 years
later than the previous official target—is theearliest possible date and could slip. And it
underscores the challenge of ITER’s ballooning budget. To start running by 2025, ITER
managers have asked for an extra €4.6 billion, which they are unlikely to receive. As aresult, the report says, ITER’s ultimate goal—
producing a “burning plasma” reaction of
deuterium and tritium nuclei that sustains
itself mostly with its own heat—will be delayed from 2032 until 2035 at the earliest.
ITER officials say the report confirms thatthe project is finally on the right track. “Thereis now a credible estimate of the scheduleand cost envelope with respect to the financial capabilities of all the members,” says
ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot. “Allthe pieces are in place to make a decision”
on enacting the plan. But others say that thenew schedule is implausibly optimistic. “It’sall fiction,” says one expert who requested
anonymity to protect his connections to theproject. “As the report very carefully lays out,

there are umpteen assumptions that aren’t
going to happen.”Dreamed up in the 1980s, ITER aims toshow that deriving energy from nuclear
fusion is feasible. Specifically, it aims to produce a burning plasma, trapped in an intense
magnetic field, that will generate 10 times
more energy than it consumes. In France,
the project site is finally taking shape, asworkers erect the massive facility’s buildings and install the first components shippedfrom member states. About 40% of the workneeded for first operations is done.
But delays and cost overruns have plagued
ITER from the beginning. When the project
partners—China, the European Union, India,Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the UnitedStates—signed the construction agreement in2006, ITER was supposed to be finished thisyear for about $11 billion. The actual cost,
impossible to calculate exactly because members contribute mostly parts rather than cash
and use different accounting systems, could
be three times as high.
ITER’s woes stem from two sources, experts say. First, its design was far from complete when the agreement was signed. Infact, the report says, it’s still not complete.
Second, the ITER agreement established aweak central organization with little power
to direct the project. Those management deficiencies were laid bare in a February 2014
review that called for 11 reforms, including
the appointment of a new director-generaland the completion of a realistic “baseline”
sciencemag.org SCIENCE

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Published by AAASPHOTO: ITER COLLABORATIVE/EJF RICHE

The discussions in Manaus underscoredjust how many nagging details remain to beworked out. Hardware for controlling anddispersing the CO2 must be designed andmanufactured. Researchers must decide thebest way to ship CO2 to the site. Should theybuy it from Carboman, the Manaus supplierthat puts the fizz in the hot city’s Coca-Cola,
or tap a cheaper source on the other side of
the country and ship it up the Amazon River?
Should they upgrade the treacherous 34kilometer dirt road to the site, or find a special vehicle able to haul 15 tons of gas on thedifficult last leg of the journey? Lapola had
recently test-driven a truck that might work:a modified mobile missile launcher made in
the Czech Republic.
Construction at the site should get
underway by the middle of next year, Lapolasays. So far, he has raised about $4 million
in grants from the Inter-American Development Bank and two Brazilian agencies, nearlyenough to run the two-plot startup phase of
the experiment, but he will need tens of millions of dollars more to expand to eight plots
for another decade, as planned. Much of themoney will go to CO2, Lapola says: With thegas constantly escaping into the sky and surrounding forest, each treatment plot willneed about 3.7 metric tons of CO2 per day, orabout 1350 tons a year, at up to $1000 a ton.
The 2-year startup phase of the experimenthas budgeted $1.3 million for the gas alone.
Results should start coming in 6 months
after AmazonFACE begins, Lapola says, but
it will take years for some effects of higher
CO2 levels to become apparent. Richard
Norby, a U.S. biologist from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and veteran
FACE researcher who was at the Manaus
meeting, says the results might dash hopesthat the Amazon forest will provide thelonged-for carbon sponge.
Norby’s own experiment on a sweetgum plantation in Tennessee and studies inother forests have shown that trees exposed
to elevated CO2 initially grow faster and sequester more carbon. But sometimes thebeneficial effect abates within a few years,
for reasons not yet clear. Norby says he expects a similar result in the Amazon. Like
many other researchers, he thinks that a lackof phosphorus—a critical plant nutrient—inmost Amazon soils will limit tree growth
there, no matter how much CO2 is present
in the air. In the long term, he told his colleagues on the drive from the research site toManaus, “I don’t expect the extra carbon will
do didley in this system.” j

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NEWS | I N D E P T H

construction schedule and cost estimate. Last
November the ITER organization presented
that new baseline—called the updated longterm schedule (ULTS)—to the ITER Councilof representatives from the member states,
and the council requested the independent
review. The ULTS itself has never been madepublic, researchers say, but the panel report
gives the bottom line.
The 14-member review panel, headed byAlbrecht Wagner, former chief of the DESY
particle physics lab in Hamburg, Germany,praised Bigot, a French nuclear physicist
with extensive management experience in industry and government, for greatly improving ITER’s management. The changes have“led to a substantial improvement in project
performance, a high degree of motivation,and considerable progress during the past
12 months,” the report says.
However, the report also suggests thatthe new schedule falls short of providing atrue, reliable baseline. “[T]his is a successoriented schedule with no contingency,” thereport says. “If any of the major risks that the[ITER organization] has identified materializes, then the [first plasma] date will almost
certainly slip by some degree.” The reviewers
do not give a “probable” date for when ITER
might actually start, notes the expert withconnections to the project, who estimates it
at 2028 or 2029. “The answer is so devastating that if they came out and said it in public,
they might lose [the support of] the European Union,” he says.
The biggest assumption behind the schedule is that members will provide an extra€4.6 billion ($5.2 billion) between now and2025. That money would enable the ITER
organization to hire many more engineers,technicians, and skilled workers to assemble

ITER’s evolving budget: More, later
Compared with ITER’s 2010 “baseline,” the schedule presented last November pushes first operations back5 years. And to limit peak spending, ITER officials would now delay the key deuterium-tritium (D-T) runs to 2035.

€millions/year

800
600

Firstplasma

FirstFirst
D-Tplasma plasma plasma

D-Tplasma

D-Tplasma2010 baseline
2015 revisionlatest revision400DATA: ITER

2000′08′10′12′14′16′18′20′22′24′26′28′30

SCIENCE sciencemag.org′32′34RENEWABLE ENERGY

A reboot forwave energy
U.K. engineers and funders
take stock of failures as they
design new prototypes
By Erik StokstadIn the remote Orkney archipelago off
Scotland’s northern coast, workers have
hauled a 180-meter-long metallic sea
monster onto a pier and are dismantling it. For several years, the snakelike
machine floated 2 kilometers offshore,tethered to the seabed. As it undulated in
the waves, fluid was forced through thesleek beast’s hydraulic motors, generating
up to 750 kilowatts of power, which wassent to shore via submarine cable. Now, itsguts and joints are being dissected and examined for wear. “It’s like an autopsy,” says
Tim Hurst, director of Wave Energy Scotland (WES) in Inverness, a funding program in the economic development agency
that now owns the machine.
The wave energy prototype worked, but
its test run ended ignominiously, amid investors’ fears about its durability and slow
pace of development. Fated for the scrapheap, it is a symbol of recent setbacks inthe wave energy sector here. The machine’sbuilder, Pelamis Wave Power, was the firstcompany to feed electricity generated bya floating wave device into a national grid.
But in late 2014, the Edinburgh-based company failed after investors pulled out. A year
later, the other leading U.K. wave powercompany, Aquamarine Power in Edinburgh,
went belly-up for the same reason.
Now, the Scottish government is goingback to the drawing board. In December
2014, it created WES to fund cross-cutting
research on wave energy and to improve
technology transfer. And a new crop ofcompanies is counting on novel, and often
more-compact, designs to rescue the nascent industry. “There’s quite a change goingon,” says Neil Kermode, managing directorof the European Marine Energy Centre in
Orkney, which tests wave and tidal devices.
The renewed efforts, he adds, are crucial toensuring that the United Kingdom becomes
an exporter of wave energy technology.
Buffeted by strong waves and tides, theU.K. coastline is a rich resource and natural
test bed for ocean energy. Efforts to harness
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the parts that the members provide. It would
also enable the ITER organization to develop
a reserve fund for contingencies. However,the ITER Council made it clear at its last
meeting in November 2015 that the cash
would not be forthcoming. In particular, representatives of the European Union—which,as host, bears 45% of the financial burden—
noted that the European Parliament has fixed
spending on ITER through 2020, and it cannot be increased.
Since then, the ITER organization has
been trying to figure out how to keep to theschedule at a lower annual cost, adjustingit even as reviewers were analyzing it. One
option would be to delay the constructionof some components that won’t be neededin the experiment’s early years, when it will
run on just hydrogen or deuterium. Neither
substance can support a burning plasma, so
the start of runs to achieve one would haveto wait an extra 3.5 years, until 2035, the report estimates. That date “is so far off that it’smore like an idea,” says Stephen Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, a nonprofit
foundation in Gaithersburg, Maryland, thatadvocates for fusion development.
The review panel calls for the formulationof a real baseline by November. Reaching consensus on the schedule may be difficult, Deanwarns, because ITER members have divergent priorities. Whereas the European Union
frets over annual costs, Japan and South
Korea worry about keeping the schedule
for burning plasma, he says. That’s because
they’re already planning ITER’s successors,“demo” power plants that would generate
electricity. To build one by 2050, they need
the ITER data as soon as possible. “From thebeginning of the process the Asian countries
wanted to get to [deuterium-tritium] burning
as fast as possible,” Dean says. “They are notgoing to be happy to hear that the date for
D-T burning is as far away as 2035.” j

The foundations of ITER’s reactor pit
take shape in Cadarache, France.

More delays for ITER, as partners balk at costs
Daniel Clery and Adrian Cho (May 5, 2016)
Science 352 (6286), 636-637. [doi: 10.1126/science.352.6286.636]

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