The EU decided that it had to choose between its two candidate sites – Cadarache and Vandellos – to increase its chance of success in Washington. Technical assessments concluded that either would work. Building in Spain would be cheaper but the site, next to an existing nuclear power station, didn’t have any science institutes nearby. At Cadarache there was already a wealth of scientists and engineers on hand if help was needed, but the site was far from the sea so the transport of large and heavy components could be tricky. Debate over the two sites raged on through the summer and autumn. Favours were called in; backs were scratched; and different countries lined up behind their favourite sites. Although the process was divisive at the time, it helped to cement Europe’s determination to win ITER. In a sense, the Europeans felt that they had earned it. While the US fusion budget was slowly whittled away and the Russian and Japanese programmes were undermined by their struggling economies, Euratom had kept the whole project afloat, especially during the years after America’s withdrawal. Hosting ITER on European soil would be the payback.
The person who found himself in charge of Europe’s effort to win ITER was Achilleas Mitsos, a gruff economist from Greece and a specialist in European integration who joined the European Commission, the EU’s civil service, in 1985. As is the custom at the Commission, every few years he was moved to a different job, managing such issues as social and economic cohesion, education and training, and socio-economic research, before eventually becoming director-general for research in 2000. By now a seasoned operator in the Brussels bureaucracy, Mitsos was unruffled by the tussle between Cadarache and Vandellos. It had required some diplomacy: to appease Spain when Cadarache was chosen, it was promised that the organisation that would eventually be needed to manage Europe’s part of ITER construction would be based there. But that did little to prepare him for what was going to come next.
The Washington meeting of the ITER council was to be the project’s turning point, the moment it changed from an idea on paper into an international collaboration intent on building a fusion reactor. President Bush was on standby to come in and lend authority when it came time to sign an agreement. Everyone expected a deal to be done, but the events of 9/11 cast a dark shadow over the meeting. The Iraq war had begun only nine months earlier and relations between the United States and France were in a deep freeze because of French opposition to the war. Now the EU had the temerity to come to the negotiating table with a plan to site ITER in France.
Tensions began to simmer before the meeting even got started. Shortly beforehand, an unsigned document was circulated to all the delegations apart from Japan describing the merits of Cadarache as well as many claimed shortcomings of Rokkasho, including the high cost of labour and electricity, risk of earthquakes and lack of infrastructure. The Japanese were furious. The US, following its recent return to the collaboration, was determined to get the site decision settled at the Washington meeting and so tried to calm frayed tempers.
The partners had been expected to have a sober debate and then come to an agreed position on where to build ITER. In the event, the meeting was a train wreck. First, the Canadians withdrew their site. Ontario Hydro and its partners had failed to win the support of the Canadian federal government and without that the site, and Canada’s membership in the collaboration, were non-starters. With Cadarache and Rokkasho now head-to-head the partners lined up behind their favourites: Russia and China supported Cadarache; Korea and the US favoured Rokkasho. The negotiations became a slanging match. Europeans accused the US of only supporting Rokkasho because it couldn’t stomach giving ITER to France, while the Americans charged Europe with blackmail after some French delegates said that if ITER went to Japan, France would pull out of the whole project. In the end, nothing was decided. The two sites were asked to provide more technical information to help resolve the issue. The champagne stayed corked and the teams headed home amid an air of mistrust and accusation.
For the next eighteen months, fusion scientists looked on in horror as their cherished project became ammunition for diplomatic warfare. Senior researchers were now excluded from meetings deciding the fate of ITER as government officials took over. After the conference-room sniping of the Washington meeting, salvos for and against the two sites continued in the media. US energy secretary Spencer Abraham told Japanese business leaders: ‘From a technical standpoint you have offered the superior site.’ The French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin fired back: ‘We have to have ITER, even if we do it ourselves… We won’t let go of this.’ High-ranking politicians toured the capitals of other ITER partners trying to win support. Both sides hinted that they would consider going ahead anyway with any partners that wished to join them. Japan and the EU even offered to shoulder larger and larger proportions of the total construction cost, in efforts to buy support.
Each side tried to exploit the weak points of the opposing site. Rokkasho’s Achilles’ heel was earthquake risk. Japan sits on the Pacific ‘ring of fire,’ an area around the ocean margin that is prone to quakes and volcanoes. Although Chinese officials didn’t say anything publicly because they didn’t want to inflame historic tensions between the two countries, they felt the seismic risk of Rokkasho was too great and hinted they would pull out if that site was chosen. Cadarache had the problem of being inland, so to get many of the reactor’s huge components to the site, the project would have to widen roads, strengthen bridges and modify junctions along a winding 106-kilometre route. Japan argued that transporting such components by road was impractical if not impossible, but France cited the example of the Airbus A380 superjumbo. Although assembled in land-locked Toulouse, some of the plane’s enormous parts, including whole wings and fuselage sections, are built elsewhere in Europe, shipped to southwest France and then trundled 240 kilometres through the countryside at night on purpose-built transporters.
Meanwhile, officials in Japan and France gathered more information on the suitability of the two sites in nine subject areas. A meeting was held in Vienna in mid March to debate the results. In France, licensing of the reactor would be covered by existing legislation and was already well underway; licensing in Japan required new legislation, a process which had not yet begun. The risk of a large-scale earthquake damaging to the reactor was considered twenty times more likely in Rokkasho than in Cadarache. Estimates put the cost of preparing the site at Cadarache at around one-eighth that at Rokkasho and the mild Mediterranean climate of Provence was certainly more appealing to researchers than the cold winters of northern Japan. In total, Cadarache was considered the better site in seven of the nine categories and in one they were judged equal. Its one failing was its inland position.
The comparison seemed to clinch it for Cadarache but the supporters of Rokkasho refused to concede and, because of their objections, the comparative document was never made public. The United States continued to insist it was supporting Rokkasho for technical reasons whereas in reality US officials backed Japan because they thought it would make a good, committed host, while it could not say the same of Europe. Some in the Bush administration didn’t believe that the European Union could be treated in the same way as a sovereign state. Its twenty-five members had differing levels of commitments to ITER and the administration didn’t think they could act with the unity of purpose that was needed to manage ITER’s construction and pay for it.
Something had to give in the negotiations. The open hostilities were getting nowhere. Both sides realised that there was no way to resolve the issue while one side came out the ‘winner’ and the other the ‘loser.’ To save face, there had to be some prize that would go to the side that didn’t get ITER. So began a series of bilateral negotiations between the EU and Japan, and the topic under discussion came to be known as the ‘broader approach to fusion.’ Fusion researchers had long recognised that to make progress towards a fusion power plant there were other things they needed to do apart from building ITER. They needed a particle accelerator facility to test the radiation hardn
ess of materials that would be needed for such a plant, and supercomputers to simulate it. At that time, no one had any firm plans to build these facilities but now they were needed as bargaining chips. In order to cool the rhetoric between the two sides, the issue of who would have ITER and who the other facilities was put to one side – negotiators only referred to the ‘host’ and the ‘non-host.’ The hope was that if the facilities included in the broader approach became enticing enough, one side wouldn’t mind having them rather than ITER.
The barrages of rhetoric calmed down as the potential host and non-host talked to each other. Mitsos was travelling to Tokyo twice a month during this period. Soon an appealing deal was worked out: the host would pay for almost 50% of ITER’s total cost (with around 10% each from the other partners) and the non-host would get one or more expensive facilities from the ‘broader approach’ whose cost would be shared by the host and non-host. The problem was that both Japan and the EU still wanted to be the host. Something else was needed to tip the scales towards the non-host so that one of the two would be prepared to accept it.
One day in summer 2004, Rob Goldston, the director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, was tidying his house. Japan’s deputy science minister was coming to visit the lab and Goldston had invited him to dinner at his home on the evening before the visit. Once everything looked suitably welcoming, Goldston sat on the stairs and tried to think of ways to break the deadlock over ITER’s site because that evening’s dinner provided him with a rare opportunity. Goldston knew that there is a strict protocol when dealing with Japanese politicians and some topics of conversation are off-limits. But there is also an unwritten rule that late in the evening, after a certain amount of alcohol has been consumed, it is acceptable to speak frankly and broach difficult subjects. Goldston had made a list of his ideas and when he was joined by his son Jake on the stairs he showed him the list. Jake, a university economics student, told his father, with the confidence of youth, that they were all useless, apart from number 4.
Idea number 4 was that as an added incentive for the non-host, the host – which is paying for 50% of the whole machine – would pay for some its components for ITER (for example, 10% of the total) to be built by firms in the non-host country. So the host still pays no more than 50%, but the non-host’s industry gets more of the benefit. This, explained Jake, was the only one of Goldston’s ideas in which the non-host got something unambiguously worth having in addition to the broader approach facilities. Goldston phoned officials at the Department of Energy and explained that he wanted to propose this idea to his Japanese visitor. He was told that it would be OK, so long as the idea was not attributed to the DoE.
The evening went according to plan. As soon as enough wine had been drunk, Goldston broached the subject of the ITER site and explained his idea. At the end of the evening the minister went away with a two-page memo spelling out the plan that Goldston had prepared earlier. When the visitor arrived at the lab the next morning, he immediately asked to use a fax machine. He wanted to send the memo to Tokyo before work ended that day. The ball was set in motion and would soon gather more momentum.
It took many more months for all the details to be worked out, but in May 2005 the Yomiuri Shimbun, a Japanese daily paper, quoted government sources as saying that Japan might be willing to give up its bid to host ITER if it won a lucrative role in construction. It took one final EU-Japan meeting the following week in Geneva to seal the deal. The two sides had resolved to have the issue settled before the 6th July start of the G8 economic summit at Gleneagles in Scotland. So at the beginning of July, just days before world leaders would gather in Scotland to discuss climate change and aid to Africa, and George Bush would collide on his bicycle with a British policeman, delegations from the ITER partners were welcomed to Moscow by Evgeniy Velikhov, the same person who twenty years earlier had persuaded Mikhail Gorbachev to propose ITER as a worldwide project ‘for the benefit of all mankind.’ Now he oversaw another turning-point in its progress: as everyone now expected, Cadarache was announced as the site for the reactor.
Also revealed was how much Europe had to pay to get it. The division of the €5-billion cost followed the plan worked out between the EU and Japan including the extra 10% shifted from host to non-host outlined in Goldston’s idea number 4. In addition, 20% of ITER headquarters staff would be Japanese and the EU would support Japan’s proposal for a director general. As for the broader approach, Japan would get to choose a facility to build on its soil, up to a cost of €800 million, with half paid by the EU.
After eighteen months of often rancorous negotiations, everyone seemed pleased with the outcome. Japanese industry could look forward to lucrative contracts paid for by Europe, while Europe could bask in the prestige of being the home of ITER. Although some European researchers worried about what they had taken on: the huge cost of ITER now threatened to starve all other fusion projects. Nevertheless, there was a palpable feeling of relief for everyone involved.
Just over a year later, France was able to chalk up one more minor victory over the United States when ministers from the seven partners (India joined early in 2006) came together to sign the international agreement that would make ITER an official collaboration. The ceremony was overseen not by President Bush in Washington but by President Jacques Chirac at the Elysée Palace in Paris. Earlier that year, Mitsos had stepped down from his job at the Commission and returned to Greece. His job was done. ITER was no longer a dream: it was a genuine collaboration of nations representing – with the addition of India – more than half the world’s population. It now had a staff, a headquarters, a large patch of bare earth, and a plan. All they had to do now was build it.
A 1:50 scale model of the reactor at ITER headquarters in Cadarache.
(Courtesy of ITER Organisation)
CHAPTER 8
If Not Now, When?
IN THE EARLY 1970S, WHEN MOST OF THE WORLD’S FUSION researchers were rushing to build tokamaks following the success of the Russian T-3 machine, some in the US thought it wasn’t a good idea to turn their fusion programme into a one-horse race. In its twenty years of existence, the US programme had supported a range of different fusion machines – stellarators, pinches, mirror machines and other more exotic devices. But their number was decreasing. The stellarator had been largely abandoned with the arrival of the tokamak and others simply didn’t perform well enough, suffering from instabilities, leaking plasma, or too low temperatures or densities. Something else was needed if the US programme wasn’t going to become the tokamak show.
The strongest contender, though still some way behind tokamaks, was the mirror machine. These devices had been a mainstay at the Lawrence Livermore lab near San Francisco ever since it was founded and Richard Post was made head of its controlled fusion group. Post and his colleagues had built a number of small machines but instabilities were preventing them from confining a plasma for more than a fraction of a millisecond and plasma density remained low. But for reactor engineers, mirror machines have an elegant simplicity: straight field lines, plain circular magnets, predictable particle motions – a far cry from the geometrical contortions needed to make a tokamak or stellarator work. They confine plasma the same way that a stellarator does: with magnetic field lines aligned along the tube and particles pulled towards the lines so that they execute tight little spirals around them. The problems with a mirror start when the particles get to the end of the tubular vessel: how do you stop them escaping?
The simplest solution is to have an extra-powerful magnet coil around each end of the vessel. This squeezes the field lines into a tight bunch. When the spiralling particles encounter this more intense magnetic field they are repelled and head back the way they came, back along the tube. This works for the majority of particles but a lot still leak out, reducing the performance of the device. Researchers developed other more complicated designs for the end-magnet in the hope that they would produce a more leak-proof magnetic plug. These includ
ed coils in the shape carved out by the stitching on a baseball, and two interlocking versions of that shape, dubbed yin-yang coils in a nod to the Taoist symbol signifying shadow and light.
In 1973, researchers at Livermore were working with a mirror machine called 2XII and not getting very good results – the confinement was poor. They noticed, however, that containment improved when the plasma densities were higher, so they started looking for ways to inject more plasma and thereby boost the density. Colleagues at the nearby Berkeley Radiation Laboratory provided the solution: they were developing a system for producing neutral particle beams and to the 2XII team this seemed an ideal way to add more material to their plasma. It took two years to upgrade their machine for neutral beam injection but when they fired up their new 2XIIB – with an extra ‘B’ for ‘beams’ – in June 1975 they found that the containment was actually worse.
In desperation they tried a trick that had been suggested years before as a way of damping down instabilities: passing a stream of lukewarm plasma through the hot plasma in the vessel. The improvement was dramatic. By the following month they had doubled the ion temperature to 100 million °C – a record at the time – reached record plasma density and increased the confinement time tenfold. There was another side effect: the warm flow made the neutral beams very effective at heating the plasma, so much so that the researchers felt that they could abandon the heating method they had used previously – a rapid current pulse in the magnet coils to rapidly compress the plasma. Without the current pulse, 2XIIB was effectively a steady-state machine – the holy grail of reactor designers.
Piece of the Sun : The Quest for Fusion Energy (9781468310412) Page 25