Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [97]
Even a decade after the Geneva meeting, nobody had agreed where ITER would be built. Rather than consolidating multiple international efforts into one big project, the need to distribute the pork among the parties led to just the opposite: duplication of effort. There were three centers—one in Germany, one in Japan, and one in the United States—devoted to designing the reactor.
Declining budgets made matters much worse. Fusion scientists in the United States had been making drastic cuts to their research program. They obliterated almost everything that wasn’t part of a tokamak project; the nation put almost all its magnetic fusion eggs in the tokamak basket. Many fusion scientists thought that other configurations (including some new ones like “spheromaks”) might lead to a working reactor faster than a tokamak would. In their view, cutting off research for these alternatives was shortsighted and premature. The tokamak shouldn’t be the only game in town. Thus, they were against ITER. They didn’t want to wager everything on a single enormous tokamak. Moreover, they weren’t alone in their wariness of the international reactor. Even tokamak physicists felt threatened, because the domestic fusion program would have to be gutted in favor of the enormous international collaboration. The already stretched budgets would have to accommodate ITER. Congress would not provide additional funds for more big domestic experiments, and the existing ones would be quickly shut down to cut expenses. Laboratories like Princeton’s would become superfluous without a major machine to experiment with. There would only be one big machine in the world, and it would likely be overseas.
Thus, by the mid-1990s, ITER had a large number of opponents: non-tokamak fusion scientists who resented the single-minded concentration on tokamaks, tokamak physicists who were afraid of having the domestic fusion program shipped overseas, and most important of all, politicians who saw taxpayer money flowing into the hands of other countries’ governments. Everybody, in theory, liked the idea of a huge international fusion effort. In practice, though it was unpopular, and budgets were still in free fall.
By 1995, the magnetic fusion budget had been hovering around $350 million per year. The President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), an independent panel of experts that counseled the president on all matters scientific, gave Bill Clinton a grave warning about the fusion budget. At $320 million per year, the domestic program would be crippled, and ITER—as planned—would be too expensive to support; it would have to be renegotiated at a lower cost. A demonstration fusion power plant would be at least forty years away. If the budget dropped below $320 million, the consequences were almost too horrible to contemplate. The committee tried to envision a worthwhile fusion program with lower levels of funding but came to the following conclusion:
We find that this cannot be done. Reducing the U.S. fusion R&D program to such a level would leave room for nothing beyond the core program of theory and medium-scale experiments ... no contribution to an international ignition experiment or materials test facility, no [new domestic tokamak], little exploitation of the remaining scientific potential of TFTR, and little sense of progress toward a fusion energy goal. With complete U.S. withdrawal, international fusion collaboration might well collapse—to the great detriment of the prospects for commercializing fusion energy as well as the prospects for future U.S. participation in major scientific and technological collaborations of other kinds.
When Congress passed the 1996 budget, magnetic fusion got about $240 million. It did not take long for things to unravel completely.
In the meantime, the projected costs for ITER were