ITER Project Faces Delay and Cost Increase, Future Uncertain

TapTechNews July 3 news, the world's largest nuclear fusion experiment project - the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project has encountered setbacks, and the test plan will be postponed by several years, and the project cost will also increase by billions of US dollars, which is undoubtedly a worse situation for this already costly project.

The ITER project is jointly built by 32 countries, and the construction site is located in the south of France. This dazzlingly complex machine is composed of more than one million parts and is currently suffering from supply chain problems that began during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ITER Director-General Pietro Barabaschi said at a news conference on Wednesday: Undoubtedly, the delay of ITER is not a positive signal. From the perspective of nuclear fusion addressing current human problems, we should not expect it to solve the urgent problems immediately, which is imprudent.

This is already the second time the ITER project has revised the budget and timetable in eight years. The full test of the reactor will now be postponed to 2039, four years later than the previously estimated 2035.

The ITER was originally planned to cost about 5 billion US dollars and start testing in 2020. But the budget has now ballooned to more than 22 billion US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 160.37 billion yuan). The test date is still undetermined. The scale of the additional funding requirement is still being calculated and is expected to be announced later this year, but Barabaschi said the sum would be about 5 billion euros.

The delay of ITER means that the project may be overtaken by private test projects using smaller reactors, such as CommonwealthFusionSystemsLLC and TokamakEnergyLtd., which plan to start testing prototypes in this decade. Fusion is the energy source of the sun and can theoretically produce unlimited clean energy.

Barabaschi said he is very skeptical that any start-up company that promises to achieve commercial operation by 2040 can achieve this goal. Even if we prove the feasibility of thermonuclear fusion today, I don't think we can achieve its commercial deployment before 2040, he said. We still need to solve many other technical problems to make it commercially viable.