The strange controversy surrounding ITER

by Andrew Teller

ITER, the reader will certainly recall, is the next step in the world’s endeavour to produce energy by fusing light nuclei together (see ENS NEWS no 4, Spring 2004). After protracted discussions, it was decided last year that the Cadarache site, in the south of France, would house the reactor. Having reached consensus on the siting, the parties got finally round to signing the international ITER Agreement, which took place on 21st November 2006 at the Elysée Palace in Paris. The event triggered a wave of renewed protests from several environmental organisations. Many reasons were invoked to justify such opposition, most of them beside the point or clearly disingenuous. I would like to examine two of them here, because they look reasonable enough to convince the uninformed. First, the undertaking having already suffered countless delays, there would be no reason to believe that it would one day provide a useful answer to the threat of global warming. Second, the amount of money required would deprive the research on Renewable Energy Sources (RES) from much needed resources and therefore hamper their development. The opponents of nuclear energy, be it produced by fission or fusion, often use arguments stemming from genuine concerns. Often also, the way they make their case is flawed and one does not need much background information to poke holes in their reasoning. Let me show here that this is the case indeed for the two abovementioned objections.

Regarding the time needed to achieve self-sustaining fusion, it is very easy indeed to cast doubts on the current estimates. The proponents of fusion have claimed for so long now that success was thirty years down the road, that The Economist felt entitled to comment that fusion experts had discovered a new physical constant. There is however a performance index readily available to assess the likelihood of the claim. This index, used to measure the performance of a fusion plasma, is called “triple product”. Any visitor to the web site of the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) will easily find the figure 1 below. It shows the progress of the said triple product. One can see that over the thirty years between 1970 and 2000, the triple product had increased faster than the number of transistors on computer chips (the famous Moore law). To be more specific, the triple product has increased by a factor of 10,000 in the said thirty years and no more than another factor of 6 is needed to achieve the value needed for a power plant. Such figures speak for themselves. They do not provide any guarantee but in a court, they would provide sufficient new evidence to have the case reopened. Ignoring it, as the opponents do, is a convenient way of maintaining a position based on prejudice, not on facts.

Let us turn now to the purported competition between fusion and RES research & development (R&D). This argument is flawed on three counts at least. First, it assumes that there is only a fixed amount of money around to finance R&D and that what is allocated to one project must necessarily be denied to another. Admittedly, ITER is going to cost 10 billion euro over thirty years. This is quite a lot of money for one single project. But how does it compare with the overall R&D budgets? On a yearly basis, 10 billion euro translate into 335 million. The R&D budgets of the world’s most industrialised countries amounted in 2003, according the European Commission’s Statistical Office EUROSTAT, to 585 billion euro. This means that the yearly requirements of ITER represent less than 0.06% of the overall yearly R&D expenditures. It is hard to believe that such a tiny fraction could disrupt all other R&D programmes in a noticeable way. In particular, for the R&D on renewables to be affected, it would have to be pushed out of the list of things to do as a very low priority item. But one can rest assured that this is not the case, owing to the popularity enjoyed by these energy sources. Taking this into account, claiming that money given to ITER will be diverted from RES R&D is therefore tantamount to saying that RES R&D has very low priority, which is clearly ludicrous.

Second, the argument is based on the implicit premise that achieving progress in RES is only a question of throwing enough money at the problem. This again is misleading. It is true that R&D can achieve practically anything (not contravening the laws of physics) given sufficient funding. But this is not the problem faced by renewables. Their problem is to become cost-effective and, obviously, spending unlimited amounts of money to make a process cost-effective can only defeat the purpose. There is no guarantee that money can buy more than marginal improvements to the existing processes, leaving them still too costly for comfort. Third, the argument equates ITER’s rocket science with the piecemeal engineering applicable to RES. The first type of activity will attract top scientists; the second one is the province of people who are content with more mundane technical work. The two are not interchangeable and the very idea that the world does not need top scientists brings sinister memories to the mind: such view was held in the past only under the worst of political regimes.
As is often the case, the two objections just examined do not resist scrutiny. Despite all the remaining uncertainties, it is worth giving ITER a try. The risk of failure, which cannot be ascertained without the experiment soon to be undertaken, will not affect much other R&D projects. The rewards of success on the other hand are simply too good to be overlooked.

Second, the argument is based on the implicit premise that achieving progress in RES is only a question of throwing enough money at the problem. This again is misleading. It is true that R&D can achieve practically anything (not contravening the laws of physics) given sufficient funding. But this is not the problem faced by renewables. Their problem is to become cost-effective and, obviously, spending unlimited amounts of money to make a process cost-effective can only defeat the purpose. There is no guarantee that money can buy more than marginal improvements to the existing processes, leaving them still too costly for comfort. Third, the argument equates ITER’s rocket science with the piecemeal engineering applicable to RES. The first type of activity will attract top scientists; the second one is the province of people who are content with more mundane technical work. The two are not interchangeable and the very idea that the world does not need top scientists brings sinister memories to the mind: such view was held in the past only under the worst of political regimes.

As is often the case, the two objections just examined do not resist scrutiny. Despite all the remaining uncertainties, it is worth giving ITER a try. The risk of failure, which cannot be ascertained without the experiment soon to be undertaken, will not affect much other R&D projects. The rewards of success on the other hand are simply too good to be overlooked.

Figure 1:The progress of fusion research through the years, measured by the triple product, which is an indication of the performance of a fusion plasma. Please note the logarithmic scale on the vertical axis. F or comparison, the development of computer chips is indicated. (Courtesy of EFDA)