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skyrocketing, and scientists raised new doubts about whether it would achieve ignition at all. Despite the rosy picture painted by the design team, some physicists predicted that new instabilities would cool the plasma faster than expected, meaning ITER would fail, just as generations of fusion machines had failed before it. If ITER was going to fail to achieve ignition and sustained burn, then, some physicists began to argue, domestic devices could fail just as well at half the price. The American scientists (as well as their Japanese counterparts, who were also cash strapped) started talking about scaling it back, making it into a less-ambitious experiment at a lower cost. ITER-Lite, as the plan was known, would only cost $5 billion. However, ITER-Lite would be unable to achieve ignition and sustained burn. It would be just another incremental improvement on existing devices.

Though ITER-Lite was cheaper, it would defeat the main benefit of pooling four countries’ resources. No longer would the countries be leapfrogging over what domestic programs had been able to accomplish on their own. ITER-Lite would not be a great advance over previous designs. It would just be a massive, more expensive version of what everyone else had already built.

In late 1997, Japan asked for a three-year delay in construction. It was a terrible sign, and the designers scrambled to bring down ITER’s costs. Physicists and engineers proposed various versions of ITER-Lite, but without the promise of ignition and sustained burn the troubled project was doomed. The United States decided it wanted out.

In 1998, the House Appropriations Committee noted angrily that “after ten years and a U.S. contribution of $345 million, the partnership has yet to select a site” for ITER, and slashed all funding for the project. (They even questioned whether a tokamak was the best way to achieve fusion energy.) In July, the United States allowed the ITER agreement to expire, refusing to sign an extension that the other parties had signed; in October, the U.S. pulled its scientists out of the ITER work site in Germany. ITER was dead, at least for the United States.

When ITER died, America’s dream of fusion energy was officially deferred. Since the inception of the magnetic fusion effort in the United States, the government had considered it an “energy program”—Congress funded it in hopes of generating energy in the not-too-distant future. As ITER entered its death throes, the Office of Management and Budget changed magnetic fusion research into a “science program.” This meant that the program’s funding was no longer officially tied to the goal of building a fusion power plant. It was just pure research, science for science’s sake. Consequently, it became a lower priority for Congress. An energy program was easy to drum up support for, but pure science was always iffier.

By the turn of the millennium, magnetic fusion was but a shadow of what it had been in the 1980s. The U.S. magnetic fusion budget stabilized at approximately $240 million, which was worth less every year as inflation nibbled away at the value of the dollar. The golden age of magnetic fusion was over in America.

Scientists in Europe, Russia, and Japan struggled to keep the ITER project alive without the United States’ participation. They quickly decided that ITER, as originally envisioned, would be impossible to build. The three parties settled upon an ITER-Lite design. Gone was hope of ignition and sustained burn. Gone was the hope of a great leap toward fusion energy. And without the United States, even a drastically reduced ITER would be decades away.

In the meantime, fusion scientists had to make do with their increasingly obsolete tokamaks. They did their best to put a positive spin on a bad situation. Even as the original plans for ITER were dying, European and Japanese researchers finally claimed they had achieved the long-sought-after goal of breakeven. It was not as impressive as ignition and sustained burn, but if true, scientists had finally broken the fifty-year-old jinx and gotten