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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 if the Apollo program had been budgeted in the same way as fusion in this country, we would be looking forward to the first man to land on the moon a few decades from now.
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.