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President Bush announced on January 30, 2003
that the U.S. was joining the negotiations for
the construction and operation of a major international
magnetic fusion project. Known as ITER (Latin
for “the way”), the project’s
mission is to demonstrate the scientific and
technological feasibility of fusion energy,
the power source of the sun and the stars.
“The results of ITER,” President
Bush said, “will advance the effort to
produce clean, safe, renewable, and commercially
available fusion energy by the middle of this
century. Commercialization of fusion has the
potential to dramatically improve America’s
energy security while significantly reducing
air pollution and emissions of greenhouse gases.”
In November 2003, the Department of Energy
published Facilities
for the Future of Science: A Twenty-Year Outlook,
a landmark portfolio of prioritized new scientific
facilities and upgrades of current facilities
spanning the scientific disciplines to ensure
that the U.S. retains its primacy in critical
areas of science and technology. ITER was the
top-ranked project in that roadmap.
The Bush administration considers fusion a
key element in U.S. long-term energy plans because
fusion offers the potential for abundant, safe
and environmentally benign energy. ITER will
allow scientists to explore the physics of a
burning plasma at energy densities close to
that of a commercial power plant, the critical
next step in producing and delivering commercially
available electricity from fusion to the grid.
Another key advantage of fusion energy over
current methods of electricity generation is
that it can produce hydrogen with no carbon
emissions. Thus, ITER may contribute to a hydrogen-based
economy of the future.
The Department of Energy has led the U.S. delegation
to the ITER talks. The other six ITER parties
are China, the European Union (EU), India, Japan,
the Russian Federation, and South Korea. Countries
representing more than half of the world's population
are participating in ITER.
In June 2005, the ITER parties announced the
ITER international fusion reactor will be located
at the EU site in Cadarache, France.
The U.S. ITER Project Office, a partnership
of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, is responsible
for project management of U.S. activities to
support construction of the international research
facility. It is located at Oak Ridge so that
the U.S. ITER program can take advantage of
the project management experience developed
by ORNL during the construction there of the
Spallation Neutron Source (SNS). The $1.4 billion
SNS, a neutron scattering facility that will
make the U.S. the leader in the next generation
of materials research, is the largest civilian
science project in the country and was completed
on scheduled and on budget in 2006.
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