Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [104]
The American magnetic fusion program, in the meantime, was in ruins. There was no big domestic tokamak, just a few lesser ones in Boston and in San Diego. The big domestic tokamak, TFTR, had been shut down in 1997 to make room for ITER. Princeton, once home of the $100 million giants, was reduced to working on a tiny, $25 million spherical torus. Plans existed for larger machines, such as billion-dollar tokamaks, but they were just dreams; there was no chance they would be built. The United States was rapidly retreating from the cutting edge of magnetic fusion. Instead of getting a robust domestic program along with an enormous international reactor, American fusion scientists had neither. By 2002, with slim pickings at home, those scientists began to eye the slimmed-down ITER project, argued that many of the design flaws of the original machine had been fixed, and asked to rejoin the collaboration. At a cost of only about $1 billion, they argued, the United States could become an ITER partner again. The request worked its way up the food chain—from the scientists to a fusion advisory panel, to the head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, to the secretary of energy, to the president. The answer was yes.
In early 2003, President Bush announced that the United States was back in the collaboration. The Americans would rejoin ITER.79
Even though the machine’s design had been revamped and the collaboration had expanded—China, South Korea, and Canada had joined in—the same problems that haunted the first incarnation of ITER remained. For one thing the partners were still fighting over where the machine would be built.
Japan and Europe were the main contenders. Each attacked the other’s proposal. Japan complained that the proposed European site in the south of France was too far from a port. The French argued that the Japanese site was prone to earthquakes. Most scientists in the United States understandably seemed to prefer a laboratory a short drive from the French Riviera to one near a dismal brackish lake in the north of Japan, but the United States officially backed the Japanese site. Some Europeans hinted, darkly, that American support of Japan over France was political payback for France’s criticism of the Iraq war. The Japanese accused the Europeans of circulating a nasty anonymous memo to the ITER parties that faulted the Japanese choice of site. China and Russia backed France. Canada pulled out of the collaboration entirely. Europe threatened to do so as well. In early 2005, more than three years after the United States had reentered the collaboration, ITER was deadlocked and on the brink of unraveling once again.
Back at the Capitol, Congress once again was getting very annoyed at the delay—and another old debate reopened. American fusion scientists started bickering about whether it was wise to decimate the domestic fusion program to fund an international reactor. The Department of Energy slashed its domestic programs to finance ITER; Congress restored the domestic funds and threatened to completely cut off money for the international reactor. ITER was about to collapse entirely.
Luckily for ITER’s backers, the Japanese blinked just in time. Japan agreed that the French would host the reactor, but in return Europe would pay half the reactor’s cost and would use Japanese companies for many of its manufacturing contracts. Furthermore, Japan would get to host a $600 million facility devoted to researching advanced materials for fusion reactors, materials that could withstand the