On June 20 (we’re catching up with the news after our intense work in the lab) the leaders of the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) project announced a decade-long delay in their plans for operation of the giant machine, the world’s largest fusion experiment, which is still under construction in southern France. Initial operation which had been planned for 2025, has now been pushed back to 2035. Since the last schedule had been announced in 2016, the time remaining in construction has now actually lengthened from nine to eleven years. Whether this schedule will also face revisions is an open question. An additional 5-6 billion dollars will be needed to fund the added years of work.

As had been widely reported previously, the delays were needed because two of the three giant sets of parts that make up the planned machine were found to be faulty. Each set of building-sized parts had been built in eight different locations around the world. The most complex set, the magnetic coils, were actually the only ones made correctly. The innermost layer, the vacuum vessel that will surround the hot plasma, had been improperly welded and could not fit together with the required mm-sized tolerances, so will have to be re-machined and re-welded on site. The outermost layer, the thermal blanket that was to remove the energy that the ITER device would hopefully generate, had extensive leaks in its cooling pipes, which will have to be removed and replaced, again at great cost. Ironically, but perhaps predictably, the errors had been made because of cost-cutting decisions by ITER management.

The large delays have raised significant questions about the viability of the project. Not only LPPFusion, but most private fusion companies expect that they can demonstrate commercial fusion energy production before 2035. Of course, their plans could be delayed as well, but there is certainly a large possibility that ITER could be obsolete before it ever operates.

Iter assembly room | lpp fusion

A portion of the giant ITER assembly room awaits the repaired parts.

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