ITER, the world鈥檚 largest fusion power project, has been hit by a 10-year delay, meaning plans to switch it on have now been pushed back to 2035. This could see the state-funded effort overtaken by commercial fusion projects, leaving some to question whether it is even worth continuing with the experiment. Is it time to shut ITER down, or is there life in it yet?
The reactor, which is under construction in France, is a vast international effort chiefly involving the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. Work officially started in 2006, although discussions , and the first run of the reactor to create the super hot form of matter known as plasma, where nuclear fusion can occur, , but later pushed back to 2025. Construction costs have boomed, with early estimates having already tripled to over 鈧�20 billion in 2020.
Now, ITER鈥檚 management has revealed that the first plasma run won鈥檛 occur until 2035, a delay of another 10 years. The full details behind this decision and future plans are due to be announced at a press conference on 3 July.
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at the University of Manchester, UK, says ITER now feels like 鈥渢he elephant in the room鈥� in fusion circles. He believes that advances in containment technology made since ITER was designed may lead to cheaper and smaller reactors, often being developed by small commercial teams. These could offer a promising path to fusion power without the vast scale previously thought necessary.
鈥淭he problem is if you鈥檙e sat in France on the site, in charge of the programme, you鈥檙e much more likely to say 鈥榳ell, we鈥檝e gone so far, we might as well finish it鈥�. But if I was an economist I would say 鈥榙on鈥檛 chase sunk costs鈥�,鈥� says Matthews. 鈥淭here鈥檚 no reason why the people and the skills that are on the ITER site can鈥檛 be used to make something else.鈥�
One of those promising new reactors is being constructed by the UK start-up Tokamak Energy, which is a spin-off from the UK Atomic Energy Authority. But there are dozens of similar companies working on various designs around the world. The UK also has its own state-run project, the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, which it hopes will create plasma by 2035 and reach net energy gain 鈥� where more power is created than input聽鈥� five years later.
David Kingham at Tokamak Energy says that he welcomes ITER鈥檚 willingness to share information. 鈥淭his includes lessons learned 鈥� good and bad 鈥� and more detail of materials selection,鈥� he says. 鈥淚TER has validated the performance of many important materials and stimulated the development of supply chains for materials and other enabling technologies.鈥�
, the head of communications at ITER, told 快猫短视频 that the project has been hit with a run of bad luck that forced it to pivot from its original strategy; the covid-19 pandemic, the in 2022 and the discovery of that necessitated lengthy repairs.听
Once a new director-general was in place, and the scale of delays became clear, more difficult decisions needed to be made. The initial plan for ITER called for replacement parts that could be fitted once the machine had started operating, allowing it to push to higher energy levels. Due to delays, those replacement parts are now ready for installation before operations begin. Bringing their use forward in this way could shorten the ramp-up to higher energy levels once the reactor fires up, but the process of fitting them will also also contribute to the extension of the time before the first plasma is produced.
ITER has taken the pragmatic decision to spend more time preparing rather than pushing ahead with experiments that have a lower reward. For instance, says Coblentz, ITER was initially due to run with 100 kiloamperes of magnet current, but will now ramp up quickly to 15 megamperes 鈥� 150 times more.听
鈥淲hen you have all the magnets in there, but you don鈥檛 have some of the protective components like the diverter or the shield blocks that go in front of the vacuum vessel, you have to be very limited in the magnet current,鈥� says Coblentz. 鈥淵ou could end up proving that the machine works and destroying it in the process.鈥�
He says that because of these drastic changes to the plan, the organisation is now unable to say how complete the device is 鈥� despite previously stating in 2020 that ITER was .听
The result is that ITER will no longer be a project that represents the global pinnacle of fusion research in terms of energy output or cutting-edge design. Instead it will become a learning facility hosting researchers from other academic, government and commercial projects that does valuable work on component design, developing processes for building, running and recycling a reactor and training talent, says Coblentz.
鈥淭he old way of thinking, if I could call it that, has always viewed ITER鈥檚 purpose as being technology transfer, but it was seen as a sort of sequential thing 鈥� you build the public facilities over time, you finish those, you answer more scientific questions, and then the private sector comes in and starts to take over,鈥� says Coblentz. 鈥淏ut what we鈥檙e seeing is an acceleration in the knowledge transfer. The private sector, none of them want us to stop or shut down our facility. In fact, what they鈥檙e saying is 鈥榝or God鈥檚 sake, keep going, go as fast as you can鈥�.鈥�
