Eight years of delay and billions of additional costs for the international Iter reactor project

The Iter international experimental nuclear fusion reactor project, which aims to revolutionise energy production, has been hit by poor workmanship and will be delayed by at least eight years for its first crucial stage.

It is one of the most ambitious scientific projects of the moment, but it is going to be significantly delayed. In Cadarache, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, the international experimental nuclear fusion reactor Iter will not enter service in 2025. On Wednesday, July 3, those responsible for the construction site announced a delay of at least nine years.

Iter, it must be remembered, is a pharaonic project. It involves 35 countries and not only those of the European Union, there are also the United States, Russia, India and China. Powers with divergent interests, but whose scientists are united in a quest as complex as it is uncertain: to master nuclear fusion. In other words, to master the physical process at work in stars like our Sun. This source of energy is a dream, because it would make it possible to produce electricity, almost continuously, without long-lived radioactive waste and especially without CO2 emissions. To achieve this, researchers have been building this experimental reactor since 2010.

The construction site has already experienced delays. A new schedule has just been presented. The first plasma was to be produced in 2025, but it will finally be 2034. Nine years of delay therefore for this first scientific stage. A delay that is linked to the Covid pandemic, but also to manufacturing defects on essential components.

This delay must gradually be reduced. The challenge is to control the plasma, a type of gas that will be heated to more than 150 million degrees, 10 times the temperature of the core of the sun. All this takes place in what is called a Tokamak, a donut-shaped machine, where the plasma is contained with magnetic coils and where nuclear fusion takes place. Full magnetic power should be reached in 2036 and not 2033. These various delays obviously lead to additional costs, which are difficult to quantify, but the bill could increase by five billion euros, compared to the more than 20 billion already committed.

In the meantime, other projects are underway to control nuclear fusion. In the United States in particular, where scientists have announced a major breakthrough in 2022. For the first time, they have managed to produce more energy than that used to operate the machine. The technology developed by this laboratory located in California is different from that of Cadarache, since it involves lasers used to drive the fusion process. This also remains at the experimental stage. The director of the ITER project acknowledges that, for the moment, we should not count on nuclear fusion to combat climate change.