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."

Comments

Fusion is always 20 years from now

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Re:Fusion is always 20 years from now

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Fusion is always 20 years from now

[Electricity Likes Me]

That MIT survey concluded we're about 80 billion USD away from practical fusion, since if you follow the progress of funding cuts it's more less or less kept being cut every few years, ensuring that the project is always about 20 years away.

It's research who's budget has gone down continuously since the 70s.

Re:Fusion is always 20 years from now

[phantomfive]

Here is the graph, projecting how long it will take to create fusion.

If you are criticizing fusion predictions, and aren't aware of that graph, then you are basically criticizing things you don't understand. Stop it. Understand first, then criticize.

No surprise

[Virtucon]

I honestly can't imagine why people try to "manage" something like this especially when you have all of these international partners each with their own agendas running the show. It's a subcontractors dream really, get a nice fat contract and have a big charge for changes/delays... I'm sure the subs are getting very, very rich right now off of ITER.

You can't build something this complex under the model that's being used and unfortunately ITER is an epic fail. Even back in 2009, people were warning of the problems with it and still those haven't been corrected apparently. Given that we're 8 years in, I think it's time to throw in the towel considering it was supposed to be a 10 year build.

For comparison, the closest model I can think of, the LHC and the international cooperation that built it, despite it's few successes has had numerous hiccups and failures despite taking decades to plan and build. If the International community really wants Fusion power they just need to pony up to one prime contractor to build it based on the input from a team of scientists and get rid of the carved up mentality of the construction.

Re:No surprise

[geekoid]

Yes, lets thrown in the towel because something that has never been done, something using well into bleeding edge technology is behind budget. All based on a report from a contractor who makes more money if the report finds problems. This is why it's complaining mostly about intangibles.

Re:No surprise

[Electricity Likes Me]

You mean the LHC which was doing cutting edge science for the past year, and discovered the Higgs boson? That LHC?

Re:No surprise

[noobermin]

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.

Re:No surprise

[Electricity Likes Me]

It's an experimental particle accelerator, not the server you keep under your desk. It's shutdown at the moment because it's the only opportunity CERN get to actually upgrade the accelerator and it's components - you can't very well go in and expect it when it's running, because it's cryo-contained, somewhat radioactive and highly magnetized.

The shutdown is multi-purpose - there's components at CERN which haven't been replaced since the 1970s partly because they were state-of-the-art then and no one had any idea if a new one would be better or worse, because nothing on earth needed - for example - triacs - with the performance they did. And they've been in continuous service since then since CERN has expanded by turning each previous accelerator into a boost stage for the next accelerator. Before the jump to 14 TeV is the last opportunity to replace them, and so a decent amount of them is coming out.

There's also the fact that you can't just ignore those giant detectors once they're installed - nothing like that has ever been built before, and no one knows how they'll perform. ATLAS and CMS both look for the same data, but have different electrical and physical designs for sensing - both teams are currently inspecting the components of the detectors to catalog and study the performance, damage and degradation of the components. One of the interesting things is ATLAS uses liquid argon , while CMS uses a special type lead tungstate crystals for calorimetry - both new technology in their own ways, the CMS people are studying the bleaching of the lead tungstate which has been happening faster then models predict.

You know what all this has in common? All of it is science, all of it is useful (arguably the much more useful and transferrable bits of CERN as well) and all of it is just what happens when you build experimental devices. The helium explosion was unfortunate but a 1 year delay in a machine which has been planned since the 1980s is not some type of massive failure.

It's a particle accelerator, not a commercial building and has been very efficiently built to boot.

Re:Not the way to economical fusion power generati

[MildlyTangy]

ITER is a all the proof anyone should need that the Tokamak is not the way to economical fusion power generation. Of course neither is inertial confinement fusion, while we're on the topic. It would be one thing if these projects were sold as basic science, but instead they are sold as being practical approaches to fusion power generation. It's a lie.

All the report has shown is that humans are greedy and the bureaucracy expands to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

Nothing in the report implies the engineering and science is impractical and uneconomical. This is a research reactor, not the final commercial product.

Unfortunately, your post is very light on "why" it is a "lie" or why it is uneconomical, so one must assume you are either lazy, or are trolling.

Re:What could go wrong

[hcs_$reboot]

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

Re:Not the way to economical fusion power generati

[TroyHaskin]

Actually, ITER is supposed to be a proof-of-concept. That is, ITER is designed to show that a controlled and burning plasma can be created and sustained over a long period of time with a net power out (like any baseload power plant should). It's a toroidal tokamak simply because it is one of the most well-understood fusion reactor designs; spherical tokamaks, inertial confinement, electrostatic confinement, and (my personal favorite) stellarators being less so.

DEMO, another experiment, is the next step and is intended to be the bridge between ITER and a commercial design. What is DEMO is still up in the air, but it will definitely be influenced by lessons learned from ITER and other various research institutions (like, shameless alma mater plug, UW-Madison with its toroidal tokamak, spherical tokamak, and stellarators experiments).

Re:So...it's a complete failure.

[durrr]

Did you really need an article to figure that out?

I read about ITER as the future of fusion a decade ago in popsci.
The same article today would be identical.
And so would it be in 2024 when the mess is finally finished.

Meanwhile several different small scale projects that have emerged from obscurity during the last decade have put commercial viability goals within the coming decade.

A coal power plant that requires an olympic torch to ignite the fuel would be more viable than ITER.

Re:So...it's a complete failure.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not the way to economical fusion power generati

[cheesybagel]

I remember the original ITER propaganda. Originally it did not have DEMO on it as a successor. It was supposed to be the direct precursor to an actual power plant. They added that afterwards. It has been nearly two decades since that and they still haven't built it. While some things did happen to improve tokamaks, like the superconducting magnets used in JT-60 and Tore Supra, or the improved plasma control and stability they demonstrated in D-III, the same problems still exist. You can only generate net energy with D-T fusion and the reactor walls can't survive the neutron flux of D-T fusion long enough for a viable reactor to exist. Until THAT gets solved you are not going to see any commercial fusion reactor. Even if they solved that it is going to be huge and expensive. A lot more expensive than a fission nuclear reactor. Unless they manage to make the plasma more dense or something.

Re:So...it's a complete failure.

[durrr]

That still doesn't change the fact that I'm willing to bet my manhood on non-ITER derivates achiving commercial viability before ITER-derivates.

Why I can do that bet in good faith is that the ITER roadmap doesn't reach commercial viability until the end of my life, and with delays that always are inevitable on a project of this scope you'll at best recover my rusted balls of steel from my grave if the bet goes against me.

Not if you call them that!

[tlambert]

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.

Re:What could go wrong

[manu0601]

multi-billion dollar international project led by the French. What could go wrong?

French managed many big industrial projects on their own. To name a few: Ariane, Concorde, nuclear reactors and nukes...

Re:haha CH2M HILL

[vux984]

Interestingly wold does not trigger a spelling error indicator.

Because its not a spelling error. 'wold' is a word.