US will stay in ITER, boosts domestic fusion program

The US won’t be backing out of ITER, the international fusion test reactor under construction in France, for at least another year. Funding of $150 million is provided for ITER within the $1.1 trillion bill that will fund most of the government through the rest of fiscal year 2015. The figure is the same amount that the Obama administration had requested for the project. The Senate version of the bill funding the Department of Energy had ordered the US to withdraw from the project, and had provided $75 million to close out contracts with US industry to build and ship components.

But the Senate measure was never brought to the floor for a vote. The House, which did pass its version of the DOE bill, had included $225 million for ITER, and had chided the administration for unnecessarily delaying the project. The compromise bill stipulates that no less than $125 million of the appropriation fund US in-kind contributions of hardware, with the remainder a cash contribution to ITER’s central organization.

In a departure from the regular appropriations process, the differences in the two bills were reconciled by House and Senate appropriators—a process that is supposed to occur in a House–Senate conference committee after passage by both chambers.

In calling for a US withdrawal, Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the respective chair and ranking member of the DOE appropriations subcommittee, pointed to the rising cost of US participation and to a scathing 2013 review of ITER’s management. Alexander said quitting the project would save US taxpayers between $3.9 billion and $6.5 billion, depending on which of two DOE estimates were correct. DOE won’t be able to precisely estimate the US commitment until a new baseline cost and schedule is completed by the central office this summer.

The US in 2006 agreed to contribute 9.1% of the components and the cash for ITER construction. At that time, however, the value of the US contribution was put at $1.1 billion, the reactor was estimated to cost €5 billion ($6.2 billion) and construction was to be completed in 2013. Today, ITER has no official cost estimate, and US officials say that experiments won’t begin there until 2023. The House appropriations bill warned that the administration’s stingy requests for ITER would further delay construction by up to two years and result in additional cost overruns.

The spending bill also increases funding for the US domestic fusion program, which the administration has pinched in recent years to help pay for ITER. The appropriation of $318 million is 16% above the $266 million requested by the administration. That amount includes $22 million for the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at MIT, which appropriators warned they will stop funding after FY 2016.

Physics Today