Anne Davies and her DoE staff now had the unenviable task of deciding which programmes would survive and which would not. Lab directors and university department heads started jockeying for position to ensure that their reactor or research project was not cut. ITER, as the most expensive item on the wish list, started to attract the wrong sort of attention. Some in the US fusion community agreed with Aymar and others that the leap to an engineering reactor was too risky and believed something more modest should be tried first. With limited resources, some argued, why should the US be supporting a hugely expensive machine in another country – whose success wasn’t guaranteed – while denying fusion scientists at home money to carry out any meaningful research? ITER also had few friends in Congress. It was typical for a large project to be championed by the senator or member of Congress representing the state or district where the project will be built. ITER didn’t yet have a site, and it almost certainly wouldn’t be in the United States, so it lacked such a champion.
But funding and politics weren’t ITER’s only problems. In the mid 1990s two researchers from the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, William Dorland and Michael Kotschenreuther, developed a new computer simulation of the plasma inside a tokamak and it produced some very unwelcome news for ITER. The very hottest place in the plasma – where fusion is most likely to happen – is the centre, with the surrounding plasma acting as a layer of insulation slowing down escaping heat. That’s one of the reasons why a bigger tokamak is better than a small one, because there is more insulating plasma around the hot core. Turbulence is the enemy of this insulating effect because it mixes plasma from the hot core with cooler outer layers, helping heat to escape towards the edge. Tokamak designers knew about this turbulence effect and used scaling laws to extrapolate from known amounts of turbulence in existing reactors to predict how much turbulence there would be in future reactors such as ITER.
In contrast Dorland and Kotschenreuther predicted in a detailed way how plasma would behave in tokamaks of different sizes and under different conditions. They verified their simulation by adjusting it to mimic existing tokamaks and it was able to predict how they behaved pretty well. When they presented their simulation and its predictive power at conferences, other researchers were impressed. Then the pair applied their model to the proposed design for ITER and received a shock. The simulation predicted that in the large volume of plasma in ITER there would be a lot of turbulence, more than was predicted by scaling laws. This turbulence would bleed heat away from the plasma core to such an extent that, Dorland and Kotschenreuther estimated, ITER might not be able to achieve temperatures necessary for fusion.
When they presented these new results the reception was far from warm. ITER was a multi-billion dollar project to which many researchers had devoted their whole working lives; they were not going to see it sunk by a pair of computer geeks. The simulation was now subjected to much more intense scrutiny and its authors to harsh criticism. The Texas pair stuck to their guns and to this day fusion researchers remain divided over whether their predictions are correct – a working ITER will be the final proof. The research did not derail ITER but it did provide valuable ammunition to the project’s critics.
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By 1997 the ITER team was putting the finishing touches to the reactor’s final design, described in a huge 1,500-page report. The machine it described remained largely along the lines laid out by Rebut: the plasma vessel was 22m across – more than two and a half times the size of JET – with enormous, and costly, superconducting magnets to hold the plasma in place. The price tag of $10 billion was equally awe-inspiring. The target was to steadily produce 1.5 gigawatts of heat – one hundred times JET’s record-breaking output in 1997. And while JET required 14 MW of external heating to keep the reaction running, the ITER design called for 150 MW of heat, from both neutral particle beams and radio-frequency heating. The plan was for ITER to also achieve ignition – heating itself with the energy from alpha particles created by fusion reactions. At that time, no reactor had even got close to ignition.
As the scale and cost of the proposed ITER started to become apparent, US participation in the project was more and more difficult. Ever since the election of the Republican Congress in 1994 the Department of Energy’s fusion budget had been repeatedly chipped away, leading to the cancellation of TPX and the closure of TFTR. Republican representative Jim Sensenbrenner, a fusion sceptic, was appointed chair of the House Committee on Science and Technology, which was ultimately responsible for US fusion funding. Fearing the demise of fusion research in the US, DoE officials were applying tremendous pressure on Aymar and his team to keep the cost of ITER down. Aymar himself was beginning to have doubts about the design, that it was too big, too expensive and too great a leap from current knowledge. On the quiet, Aymar asked researchers at the Garching site to start work on a more modest design, one that would still generate a lot of power and so show that fusion energy was feasible, but also one that was an evolution from existing tokamaks rather than a revolution.
Others were thinking along similar lines. With only $50 million a year to spend on ITER, Davies at the DoE knew that the proposed machine was far beyond America’s means. DoE officials suggested scaling back the ITER design to build a smaller reactor, with less ambitious goals and a price tag cut in half – a plan dubbed ‘ITER Lite.’ Some US researchers, aware of the fact that funding ITER would probably squeeze fusion research spending inside the US down to nothing, were proposing an even more radical retreat: abandoning the idea of a single huge machine altogether and instead upgrading existing tokamaks and carrying out an international campaign of research to better understand burning plasmas. With doubts about turbulent heat transport in the back of their minds, they argued that if there is that much uncertainty it’s probably best not to build a huge, expensive reactor that could still fail. At academic conferences, among US researchers at least, the talk in the corridors suggested that ITER was all but dead.
According to the schedule, now that the design was complete, the partners should choose a site for the reactor in 1998 and then start building, aiming to complete ITER in 2008. But it soon became apparent that the US was not the only partner having money troubles. Japan had long been one of ITER’s most enthusiastic participants and many expected the machine to be built there. But in the spring of 1997, Japan no longer had the money to match its enthusiasm. At that time Japan’s postwar economic miracle had ground to a halt. Often referred to now as Japan’s ‘lost decade,’ the 1990s saw the country try to spend its way out of recession with ambitious public works. When this failed to get the economy moving, the government was forced to tackle the budget deficit by cutting spending. Along with other big-ticket science projects, Japan was forced to cut back on ITER, and so it asked for a three-year delay in the start of ITER’s construction.
For Jim Sensenbrenner and the House science and technology committee this just reinforced their view that the ITER project was in terminal decline. According to the committee ITER, at $10 billion, was too expensive; it was questionable whether it would work (c.f. Dorland and Kotschenreuther); and it couldn’t even be considered a viable project since it didn’t have a site. It also made the committee uncomfortable to be giving so much taxpayers’ money to a project that was not controlled by the US. The committee allowed US membership of the engineering design collaboration to run its course, but from 21st July, 1998 US participation in the project was stopped. Scientists working in Garching and Naka returned to the US. The worksite in San Diego was closed down and non-American researchers sent home. US researchers were forbidden from participating in ITER activities or meetings, even as observers. The unprecedented East-West and then global cooperation that had existed in fusion research for the four decades since the 1958 Geneva conference, and that had outlasted the Cold War, was terminated by order of the US Congress.
The ITER project was in a critical condition. With Europe now the only one of the
three remaining partners that still had a sizable fusion programme it was hard to see a way forward. Some in Europe argued that they should just abandon ITER and make something more affordable, a European successor to JET. In Japan, there was a crisis of confidence. Ever since the Second World War, Japan had taken a lead from the US in matters of foreign policy. With America out of the picture, could they trust the Europeans?
The partners set up a working group to consider two options: a large ITER-like machine able to study both the science and engineering of a burning plasma, or a number of smaller machines that could address different issues. The group concluded that the only way to examine how all the many questions surrounding burning plasma interrelate was in a single integrated machine with long pulses and alpha particles as the dominant source of heat. The Japanese decided to stay on board, so the teams in Garching and Naka were set the task of designing a new, smaller machine, costing half as much as the 1998 design but retaining as many of ITER’s technical goals as possible.
Aymar’s hunch that a slimmed-down ITER might be needed proved prescient and much of the necessary redesign work had already been done at Garching. In 2001 the teams presented a new final design for a reactor with a vessel that was 16.4m across, instead of the original 22m, and capable of carrying a plasma current of 15 MA, down from 21 MA. The output power, at 500 MW, was also one-third the previous goal, but the biggest sacrifice was that the new ITER was no longer expected to achieve ignition. Instead of running on alpha particle heating alone, the reactor was likely to need at least 50 MW of external heating to top up the alphas and keep the plasma burn ticking along. That still meant a gain (Q) of 10 but, yet again, one of the major milestones of fusion energy seemed to be retreating out of reach.
The redesign did reduce the cost of the project to a slightly less eye-watering €5 billion, but now the partners had to come to terms with the reality of choosing a site and building it. While the design of the reactor had been left for the scientists to decide – within the limits of the budget available – the choice of site would be a largely political decision and all the researchers could do was sit tight and hope for the best. The plan was for the nation that was chosen as host to shoulder the greatest share of the construction cost – because of the economic benefits of having the reactor on its territory – with the remainder divided equally among the other partners. But only a small part of each partner’s contribution would be in the form of cash paid over to the yet-to-be-created ITER organisation. Most of it would be contributions ‘in kind’: components for the reactor that would be manufactured by each partner’s home industries and then shipped to the site. ITER managers would carefully divide up and parcel out the construction work so that each partner made an appropriately sized contribution while its industry learned the skills that will be needed to build future commercial fusion power stations. Everyone wanted a share of the knowledge that could turn into a multi-billion dollar industry. But the question remained: who would play host and would it be a welcome boon or a crippling burden?
The surprise first entrant into the site contest in June 2001 was Canada, which was not at the time a member of the ITER project. The offer was being promoted by a consortium of companies led by the power utility Ontario Hydro. It had a site on the north shore of Lake Ontario just east of Toronto, next to the Darlington nuclear power station, which was already licensed for construction of a nuclear plant. In many ways, the offer made sense: Canada has plentiful supplies of tritium fuel because it is a by-product of its home-grown Candu fission reactors; Ontario Hydro would benefit by supplying electricity to the project; and, situated halfway between Europe and Japan, the Darlington site presented a compromise solution that might also lure Canada’s southern neighbour to rejoin the project.
But other partners were not ready for Canada to waltz in and carry off the prize. In Europe, Germany had always been the most enthusiastic supporter of ITER and had considered offering to host it, but the cost of reunification with East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that it was now not so keen. France, however, had an almost ready-made site: Cadarache, the Commissariat d’Énergie Atomique lab that Aymar had built up into a fusion powerhouse. It had available land and supplies of power and cooling water already built for Tore Supra, plus support from the French national and regional governments. Japan was weighing up three potential sites: Tomakomai on the northern island of Hokkaido, Rokkasho at the northern tip of the main island Honshu and Naka, north of Tokyo, home to JT-60. Russia’s economic malaise still ruled it out as a potential host.
Back in the United States, fusion researchers and the DoE were busy trying to figure out what to do next. Many wanted to get back into ITER as soon as possible and they were encouraged by the fact that the remaining ITER members were working on a smaller and cheaper design. But for a while at least, rejoining the project was not politically possible. The community began working on a design for a new home-grown reactor. Known as the Fusion Ignition Research Experiment (FIRE), the reactor would study the physics of ignition and was championed by Dale Meade, the tall and affable former deputy director of the Princeton fusion lab. Meanwhile Bruno Coppi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forward another alternative: a reactor called Ignitor which followed the model of MIT’s Alcator tokamaks in using very high magnetic fields to get strong confinement and heating. His Ignitor proposal would go all-out to show that ignition was physically possible, but others considered it would do little else to aid progress towards a power-producing reactor.
In July 2002 a few dozen senior figures from the US fusion community gathered at the Snowmass ski resort in Colorado for a two-week-long conference to consider what they should do next. Ultimately it was up to the DoE and Congress to decide what to back, but the scientists knew that if they presented a united front they were more likely to get what they wanted. There were three options on the table: rejoin ITER, build FIRE or build Ignitor. There were vigorous debates, interspersed with walks in the mountains, but a poll at the end showed where the researchers’ hearts really lay: they voted 43-to-1 in favour of rejoining ITER, with FIRE held in reserve if that proved impossible – even Meade voted for ITER. An advisory panel to the DoE considered the same question later that year and all members of the panel voted for ITER with FIRE as a backup, apart from Bruno Coppi who voted for Ignitor.
There remained the problem of persuading politicians that the project they so decisively rejected a few years earlier was now researchers’ top priority, but that now didn’t seem as impossible as it once would have. The Republican Party was not the dominant force in Congress that it had been and then there were the terrorist attacks on 11th September, 2001 which caused a change in the tenor of American politics. George W. Bush had replaced Bill Clinton in the White House in January of that year and his administration did not seem any more enthusiastic about fusion than Clinton’s. The highlight of his early energy policy seemed to be a proposal to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling companies. In the aftermath of 11th September, everything changed: suddenly energy security was high on the agenda. How could the US ensure its energy supply in the event of another large terrorist attack or conflict in the Middle East? Research into energy technologies that didn’t rely on imports of fossil fuels were suddenly flavour of the month.
Just six months after the attacks, with fusion scientists now unambiguously backing ITER, government officials began to look into how the US could rejoin the project, reportedly at the suggestion of President Bush himself. In his state-of-the-union address in January 2003, the President made a commitment to develop cleaner energy technologies and generate more of it at home rather than importing oil. Two weeks later a US delegation travelled to St. Petersburg for an ITER council meeting to begin the process of rejoining. The US was not alone in its new enthusiasm for ITER: China and South Korea also joined the collaboration in 2003.
In the space of five years the fortunes of the project had made a dramatic turna
round. In 1998 ITER had been on the brink of collapse. Now it had six partners – one of whom encompassed most of Europe – several sites vying to host it and a design that everyone believed in. At this high point, Robert Aymar decided it was time to hand the leadership over to someone else. He had supervised the completion of two designs and navigated ITER through its greatest crisis: now another project in trouble had come calling. At CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, construction of its giant particle-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, was well over budget and struggling to stay on schedule. So they called Aymar. He said at the time that he was too old to embark on a job like constructing ITER, which would go on for another ten years.
Once the question of the site was settled, the ITER project would be transformed into a fully fledged international organisation charged with building the reactor. That would mean new leadership, so in the meantime Aymar’s deputy, the Japanese plasma physicist Yasuo Shimomura, was made interim director. The whole ITER operation was in a state of suspended animation as the team waited for politicians to decide where it would be built. Japan whittled its roster of proposed sites down to one, Rokkasho, while Europe had acquired a second one, Vandellos near Barcelona in Spain. The ITER council, a biannual meeting of delegates from the partner governments, looked into the merits of the four sites and declared them all suitable from a technical point of view. If all of them would work, how were they to choose? The backers of each site began pushing other attributes, as if selling package holidays, to try to persuade other partners: Rokkasho will have Western-style housing for staff and an international school for their children; Cadarache has the weather and ambiance of Provence and the nearby Cote d’Azur; while Darlington is a stone’s throw from the cosmopolitan city of Toronto. A date was set for the council meeting that would make the decision: December 2003 in Washington, DC.
Piece of the Sun : The Quest for Fusion Energy (9781468310412) Page 24