Galeria

A Department of Energy internal review committee has concluded that the US share of ITER, the international project to build a fusion test reactor in Cadarache, France, could cost as much as $6.5 billion—$2.6 billion more than is estimated by DOE’s ITER project office. At the insistence of congressional appropriators who requested the figures, the Obama administration is now reviewing ongoing US participation in ITER. A possible shift in policy would be included in the department’s fiscal year 2015 budget request, the release of which reportedly has been delayed by at least one month from the first Monday in February date set by statute.

The US contribution to ITER consists mainly of components for the giant tokamak. A small fraction, though, would be in cash to pay for the US share of assembly costs and central office administration. Originally expected to cost €5 billion ($6.8 billion), ITER currently has no official price tag. (See Physics Today, July 2013, page 24.)

A DOE spokesperson said the department would not release details of the $6.5 billion estimate, which was prepared by the Office of Science’s office of project assessment (OPA), until a decision has been made. In a statement, Edmund Synakowski, DOE’s associate director of science for fusion energy sciences, said, “The new cost estimate, which is a range from $4.0 to $6.5 billion, is a reflection of the historical cost growth of the project and the high level of risk and uncertainty associated with this highly complicated international undertaking.”

Ned Sauthoff, director of the US ITER project office, told the nonprofit industry group Fusion Power Associates in December that his office stands behind its $3.9 billion US contribution estimate. He said his office included a contingency of $800 million (47%) on the remaining $1.5 billion of the US hardware contribution. (About $400 million worth of hardware has already been produced in the US.) The project office estimated the cash portion of the contribution would be $800 million, including the US share of a potential €1 billion operations overrun for ITER’s central offices in Cadarache, and $400 million to cover a cost escalation resulting from an expected three-year delay of ITER’s official 2020 completion date.

A worst-case scenario?

The OPA assessment tacked $1.5 billion onto the US project office’s $3.1 billion hardware cost estimate, including upping the contingency to 130%. The OPA review more than doubled the project office’s cash estimate, to $1.9 billion. “What [OPA] did was to answer the question, ‘How bad could it get—what is the outer bound on the cost?’ They took pessimistic assumptions,” Sauthoff said.

Ironically, US ambivalence to ITER is contributing to the cost escalation. The Obama administration has imposed a $225 million limit on the US annual contribution. At that rate, US obligations to the project won’t be finished until 2033—10 years after the expected date for completion of the reactor. Sauthoff estimated that the total US contribution to ITER could be reduced by as much as $500 million if the annual cap were eliminated.

Complicating matters, Congress has imposed a cap of $2.2 billion on the US total contribution for ITER’s construction phase. The other six ITER members—the European Union (EU), Japan, Russia, China, India, and South Korea—appear committed to contribute whatever it takes to build the reactor. The ITER Council, the ministerial-level body that is the project’s governing board, already has agreed to defer the cash portion of US contributions to a later date so that the entire annual payments can fund critical components.

Another look

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that funds DOE, has insisted that the administration reassess its commitment to ITER. “[She] put the onus on the White House and the administration to decide what to do,” says a Senate source. “The current approach is intolerable; either withdraw from the project or give it the necessary resources. We have to go higher than $225 million.” The administration should be able to find a few more million for several years to support the US’s largest international scientific project, he said, considering that the White House asked for a $1 billion increase for its energy efficiency and renewable energy programs in FY 2014.

Osamu Motojima, ITER director general, told the Fusion Power Associates meeting that the OPA’s numbers are too high compared with the EU’s estimate of €7.4 billion ($10.2 billion) to cover its 45% share of construction costs. Indeed, extrapolating the $6.5 billion estimate for the US’s 9.1% share would put ITER’s total cost well over $50 billion.

But the OPA review said the US ITER project office had underestimated the difficulty of obtaining seismic, safety, and tritium operating approvals from French regulatory authorities. It also was concerned that the ITER design is just 55% complete and that there is insufficient project management expertise at Cadarache to integrate so many components from such a variety of countries.

Meanwhile, the ITER Council is to consider the findings of a biennial external review of project management at a special meeting in France this month. Although the ITER Organization (IO) declined to release the review report, the Senate source says it urged major changes in IO staffing practices. Rather than having key technical positions designated for particular member nations, as is currently the case, the best-qualified individuals for those positions should be installed without regard to their nationality, the review said. The outcome of the council meeting will be critical in determining ITER’s cost, the Senate source says. Should the recommended reforms be implemented, they could bring the cost well below the upper OPA estimate.

Motojima said he agrees with all of the management review’s recommendations and is now taking steps to centralize construction management at the IO. The central office is working to reduce bureaucracy and simplify decision-making processes and approvals and will eliminate three of its nine directorates. Kattalai Sriram, director for ITER’s finance, budget, and management systems, said the IO had achieved 92% of milestones for “critical and supercritical” components—including the vacuum vessel, toroidal and poloidal field magnets, and the building that will house the reactor—during the year that ended August 2013. But he acknowledged that only 52% of milestones for all ITER’s components were met during that period.

The US and the former Soviet Union initiated ITER in the 1980s as a Cold War tension-easing cooperative science program. It was quickly joined by Japan and the EU. Bowing to pressure from Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), then chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, the US withdrew from the project in 1999. Since US reentry in 2003, much of the ITER contribution has been taken from the existing DOE budget for fusion, resulting in substantial reductions to the US domestic fusion research program.

Source: AIP Scitation

This week a two-week long marathon of meetings ended kicking off a package of 25 research topics defined in Europe’s Roadmap to the realisation of fusion electricty published twelve months ago.

Fusion energy is still in the research phase, making it all the more important to focus the European funded part of the programme on areas which are relevant for bringing electricity to the grid. Even more so given the latest BP Energy Outlook prediction of a 40% increase in the demand for electricity by 2035.

Since the publication of the Roadmap, physicists, engineers and administrators all across Europe have been working feverishly to turn paper into reality. EFDA and JET Leader Francesco Romanelli explains: ‘I appreciate the devotion that our colleagues in about 40 laboratories show to face the challenges that come with every change. On our journey from the old EFDA to the establishment of the new Consortium EUROfusion we can built on the profound experience and dedication of the colleagues involved to shape the new fusion research landscape.’

Project and Task Force Leaders like Piero Martin, Consorzio RFX; Italy, are enthusiastic. He sees the position as a unique opportunity of professional growth. He adds inspired: ‘Managing a large scientific team coming potentially from all EU countries, designing and implementing scientific programs, building consensus, and communicating efficiently will require creativity and vision.’

The accompanying or Medium-Size Tokamak campaigns expand the proven scheme used to operate and exploit JET. The first physics plasma of the Medium-Sized Tokamak campaigns was run yesterday on the tokamak ASDEX Upgrade in Germany.

Darren McDonald, Head of the ITER Physics Department, comments: ‘The programme brings together JET and the other key fusion experimental machines in Europe. These devices will be exploited on the basis of the roadmap’s defined missions using a scheme based on the one under which JET has been working effectively for a long time.’

Francesco Romanelli already looks at the next step towards fusion energy, ITER: ‘The main aim of the roadmap and the re-organisation of the research programme is to make ITER a success.’

Read more: EFDA

The International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) will count on a world leading accelerator to mimic the neutronic conditions of the first wall in future fusion demonstration and commercial power plants. The role of F4E is to coordinate the European activities supported by the voluntary contributions of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. F4E’s main responsibilities are the integration and follow‐up of the activities conducted by the European groups working on the prototype accelerator, the test facility and the target facility. The prototype systems have to be designed, manufactured, installed, commissioned and tested in order to validate the newly developed features. 

Following months of preparatory work, the installation activities for the Linear Prototype Accelerator (LIPAc) have now started with the set-up of the deuteron injector. This was designed and manufactured at CEA Saclay, one of the voluntary contributions from France to the IFMIF/EVEDA project. The injector, whose target was to generate a 140 mA deuteron beam at 100 keV, passed the acceptance tests and was then shipped to Rokkasho, Japan. In mid-November a joint team of European and Japanese engineers unpacked the injector components and proceeded with the pre-installation activities under the guidance of Raphael Gobin and Patrick Girardot, experts from CEA. The first phase was completed at the end of last year and the installation phase has been initiated under the monitoring of F4E’s Broader Fusion Development Department based Garching, Germany. The aim is to complete the assembly of the accelerator components and begin testing by early 2017.

Source: F4E

CNIM Industrial Systems and SIMIC Spa have started manufacturing the first of the 70 radial plates that will support the superconducting cables of ITER’s Toroidal Field coils. The components will essentially confine the hot plasma with the help of powerful magnets. Each company will have to manufacture 35 radial plates that measure 14m by 9m. We visited the facilities of the two companies to find out how works are advancing.

CNIM’s building at its Brégaillon industrial site has been renovated, and a brand new 3000m² production hall has been constructed close to the sea, to facilitate the transportation of large items that will be manufactured. The new building is fully air-conditioned to enable equipment to be kept at a constant temperature during its final machining. Inside the building, a 36m by 9m portal machining centre stands out “ready to machine two radial plates simultaneously to a precision of several tens of microns”, as Jean-Claude Cercassi, CNIM Commercial Development Manager, confirms. Work is progressing fast at CNIM after the first batches of raw materials were delivered. “The stainless steel segments have been machined and we are about to start with the electron beam welding,” Cercassi explains. This is now possible thanks to the installation of a dismountable vacuum chamber.

SIMIC Spa has also built a new industrial building in Porto Marghera to accommodate the production of the radial plate prototype, with brand new facilities and tooling, in order to support the production of the radial plates. A massive portal machine has been installed, which will operate in addition to the existing one that was used for the machining of the prototype, to manufacture the 35 radial plates. Marianna Ginola, SIMIC Spa, explains that “the manufacturing phase of the radial plates is the most exciting part of our contribution to the project. Our new building is ready, new tooling is in place. The production of the radial plates has started! This is a turning point for the project because the design starts taking shape and the impressive milling machine that SIMIC has invested into is put to operation. Our expertise will be fully deployed to deliver these key components”.

The first radial plates are scheduled to be completed in July, when they will be transported by sea to La Spezia (Italy) to be fitted inside the ITER Toroidal Field coils at a facility run by ASG Superconductors. After producing a second radial plate five weeks later, CNIM and SIMIC Spa are expected to accelerate production to a rate of one plate every four weeks.

Source: F4E

The world’s biggest energy research project, the $20bn ITER nuclear fusion reactor, entered a key construction phase last month, as contractors began to pour 15,000 cubic metres of concrete into a pit in the south of France. It will house a huge doughnut-shaped machine, where scientists hope to tame the fusion reaction that powers the sun as a source of clean energy on Earth.

ITER is the standard bearer in a quest to generate power by fusing together the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, which dates back to the years after the second world war. This turned out to be far harder than it was to exploit fusion in explosive form in the H-bomb.

Because the potential benefits of fusion power are so great – it produces far less radioactive waste than nuclear fission (splitting heavy atoms such as uranium) and its raw materials are almost inexhaustible – the industrialised world has persisted in the costly quest, in the face of sceptics who claim that its commercial application will always lie half a century in the future.

The ITER project was born at the Geneva Superpower Summit in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and Ronald Reagan of the US agreed to launch an international initiative aimed at developing fusion energy for peaceful purposes. The initial signatories to what was originally known as the International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor – Russia, the US, EU and Japan – were joined later by China, South Korea and India.

Conceptual design work began in 1988, followed by increasingly detailed engineering design phases until members approved ITER’s basic design in 2001. But it was then a reactor without a site. A battle over its location finally ended in 2005 with agreement to build ITER at Cadarache, near Aix-en-Provence.

Since construction started in 2010, the project has fallen further behind the original schedule for a variety of technical, contractual and financial reasons. Now the organisation expects to begin experiments in 2020, though fusion fuel – the heavy isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium – will not be fed into the reactor until 2027.

The plan is then to have a superheated “plasma” of reactants, burning at 150m degrees and generating 500MW of energy – comparable to a medium-sized power station – for several minutes at a time.

David Campbell, the project’s head of plasma operation, says: “Although there are a lot of uncertainties in fusion plasma physics and it will take some time to optimise conditions in the reactor, the work already done [in smaller experiments and computer modelling] makes me confident there are no show-stoppers to prevent us producing a few hundred megawatts of fusion power.”

The latest design changes – adding more magnetic coils inside the reactor to control the plasma and lining the vessel with metal (tungsten and beryllium) instead of carbon – are intended to smooth the way to its successful production of fusion energy.

Meanwhile, tests elsewhere are contributing invaluable data. The Joint European Torus or JET, an EU facility hosted by the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Culham, Oxfordshire, is the most important, because it is the world’s largest existing fusion reactor and the closest to ITER in design.

JET has been running for more than 30 years, but still has several years working life. Its greatest moment so far came in 1997 when it created a world record 16MW of fusion power in short bursts of up to a second.

Since then, experiments at JET have used non-reactive hydrogen to test plasma physics, systems and materials for ITER. But Steven Cowley, UKAEA chief executive, is looking forward to another power-generating run with deuterium-tritium fuel in two or three years. “We are planning to break our world record by sustaining a fusion output of perhaps 20MW for six or seven seconds,” he says.

The next step beyond ITER will be DEMO, a similar sized machine likely to be built in Asia. Its job will be to demonstrate sustained large-scale production of electric power and self-sufficiency in tritium fuel. If all goes well – politically and financially as well as technically – DEMO will be designed as ITER is running, in the hope that it could begin operations in the 2030s and feed fusion power into an electric grid in the early 2040s.

The ITER approach of magnetic confinement, confining the D-T fuel within an extremely powerful magnetic field, is the most generously funded fusion technology but not the only one. An alternative approach, called inertial confinement, involves focusing an array of ultra-powerful lasers or ion beams on a small pellet of D-T fuel – though its showcase, the US National Ignition Facility in California, is making progress more slowly than expected.

It remains to be seen whether fusion will confound the sceptics and meet what is likely to be a desperate need for clean, affordable power in the late 21st century. But the world’s leading industrial powers judge the prospect of success to be high enough to justify many billions of dollars further investment.

Source: Peak Oil