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New Review Slams Fusion Project's Management
sciencehabit writes "ITER, the international fusion reactor project in France, is reeling from an assessment that found serious problems with the project's leadership, management, and governance. The report is so damning that after a 13 February special session that reviewed and accepted the report's conclusions and recommendations, the ITER Council — the project's governing body — restricted its readership to a small number of senior managers and council members. 'We feared that if [the assessment] leaked to people who don't know about the ITER agreement, the project could be interpreted as a major failure, which is not what the management assessor intended,' says nuclear engineer Bob Iotti of the consulting firm CH2M HILL, who chairs that council."
And whenever you think it will get closer, they come up with another reason why it will take another 20 years to be commercially viable.
Been that way since Expo 63.
Will be that way in 2099.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
ITAR is a (...) project led by the French
Not exactly French. From the ITER site:
Three departments report directly to the Director-General Osamu Motojima: Administration; ITER Project; and Safety, Quality & Security. Click on the Organizational Chart below to find out more about the management structure of the ITER Organization.
and (picture)
Management greets staff on the first ITER Day in September 2011: Rem Haange, Department for ITER Project; Carlos Alejaldre, Safety, Quality and Security; Director-General Osamu Motojima; and former head of the Department of Administration, Rich Hawryluk
So, top management is made of
Director General: Osamu Motojima (Japan)
Deputy Director-General and Head of the ITER Project Department: Remmelt Haange (Netherlands)
Safety, Quality and Security: Carlos Alejaldre (Spain)
Or, look at the Organization Structure. No French in the top management
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Meanwhile several different small scale projects that have emerged from obscurity during the last decade have put commercial viability goals within the coming decade.
As someone who has worked on more than one of the smaller scale projects, I don't think anything is commercially viable within a decade. While many alternative designs offer a chance or at least hope of ending up cheaper than a tokamak, they will still require large scale projects at the level needed to produce electricity, likely with similar orders of magnitudes in costs in the $100M-$1B+ ranges. Except there is also more risks, as some of the things that had been figured out on tokamaks decades ago are being rediscovered on other machines, or finding new, different problems that need to be addressed. At least large parts tokamak designs are shifting to more engineering type problems than science problems.
Europe, Korea, Japan, and China are ramping up research efforts.
Great. So we should have fusion reactors on the grid any day now, right?
Not if you call them that!
Only if we're careful to call them "Fusion power plants", and not use words like "nuclear" and "reactor".
You know, the same way people are happy to get an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) instead of an NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), and they're happy to get a CAT scan, but would never go in for Computed Axial X-Ray Tomography... because X-Rays are radiation, but kitties are cute.
You really don't want the "bad adjective choice" protestors coming after your technology trying to shut it down.
Slashdot has become so anti-science these days. I don't disagree that ITER has some problems, but calling the Higgs Boson one of the LHC's "few successes" is such a fucking understatement, I don't know what else could be.
That was half of the point of the damn thing, to verify the standard model. Finding the Higgs was no small accomplishment.