The program’s new chief executive warns that delays will have financial consequences.
The Iter international nuclear fusion project, which aims to disrupt power generation, will face delays to be determined due to the failure of several critical parts, its chief executive said. Already, the date originally planned for 2025 for the first production of plasma, which is essential for the fusion, cannot be kept, the new general director Pietro Barabaschi told AFP on Thursday.
He was appointed in September to lead this international research project, which brings together seven partners: China, South Korea, the United States, India, Japan, the European Union and Russia. These incidents will also have financial implications. “We have to revise our plans to minimize the additional costs,” admitted Pietro Barabaschi, without giving exact figures at this point in time.
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“We have two problems,” he explained. First, gaps of up to two centimeters were discovered in parts that need to be welded together to form the “vacuum chamber,” a giant loop shaped air chamber where the fusion reaction will take place. . Three of these “sectors”, already arrived at the Iter site in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance in Provence (South of France), are affected. One of them is already installed in the pit where the experiment will take place and has to be removed.
Second defect noted, traces of corrosion on the “heat screens” that must protect against the very intense heat emitted during the melting. This could lead to leakage of the helium used in the cooling circuit. These repairs will delay the project. “This is not a process that takes weeks, but months, even a few years,” explains Pietro Barabaschi, who has to work out a new schedule by the end of the year.
The development and implementation of this new schedule will be scrutinized by France’s nuclear safety agency, which has pointed out “a lack of safety culture” in its inspections of Iter, Bastien Lauras told AFP, head of the ASN Marseille department. The independent management authority “considers that Iter has not taken sufficient measures to resolve these discrepancies (at the welding points) in time and, in particular, to prevent them from recurring in the ‘sectors’ still under construction”, he laments. Iter is expected to reach full power in 2035.
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