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New Review Slams Fusion Project's Management

Posted by Soulskill on from the doing-great-except-for-the-fusion-stuff dept.

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."

9 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Fusion is always 20 years from now by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Fusion is always 20 years from now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Fusion is always 20 years from now by Electricity+Likes+Me · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Fusion is always 20 years from now by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Re:What could go wrong by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

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  3. Re:Not the way to economical fusion power generati by cheesybagel · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Not if you call them that! by tlambert · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:What could go wrong by manu0601 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  6. Re:No surprise by noobermin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.