Washington

John Marburger thinks a US role in ITER “should be reconsidered”. Credit: BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LAB.

The United States may be poised to rejoin ITER, the international project to build an experimental magnetic fusion reactor, which it abandoned three years ago.

After several months of renewed interest in the project at the White House, John Marburger, President Bush's science adviser, confirmed that the United States is reviewing its involvement in ITER. “I definitely think that our participation should be reconsidered,” he told a meeting of reporters on 8 January.

The United States, Japan, Russia and the European Union began designing a powerful new fusion experiment, then known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, after US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev endorsed the idea at a summit in 1988.

Fusion researchers want the energy emitted from ITER to surpass the energy put into it — a goal that has eluded them for over 50 years. After 10 years of planning, the team arrived at a design for a massive doughnut-shaped machine more than twice the size of any existing fusion device.

But ITER's projected $10-billion price tag, together with technical concerns over the design, drained support in the United States, and in 1999, on instructions from Congress, the US Department of Energy withdrew from the project.

That hard-line stance now seems to be softening. In November, Sherwood Boehlert (Republican, New York) and Ralph Hall (Democrat, Texas), the chairman and senior minority member, respectively, of the House Science Committee, wrote to energy secretary Spencer Abraham asking him to send an observer to this year's negotiations on ITER's construction. In his reply, Abraham promised to review the Department of Energy's stance on the project “in the next few months”.

Reactor revisited: the project's backers hope that the revised ITER will win back US support. Credit: ITER

Project supporters hope that the Bush administration's general support for fusion power, its desire for visible political cooperation with its allies in the wake of 11 September, and revisions made to ITER's design since 1999, can combine to entice the United States back to the project.

After a reduction in the scale and scope of ITER, the project is now estimated to cost $4.2 billion. The United States' reconsideration comes as ITER's participants begin negotiations on the facility's construction. Within the next year, the collaboration is due to select a site and decide how the costs should be divided up.

“The participants are working against a very tight schedule,” says Jean-Pierre Rager, spokesman for the European negotiating team. If the United States were to rejoin, Rager encourages it to do so by June this year. “The more these negotiations advance, then the more difficult it is for the United States to join,” he says.

Japan and Canada have lobbied hard to get the Bush administration to give the project a second look. Canada, which joined the collaboration in 1997, is particularly keen on US participation, which it sees as lending credibility to its bid to host construction.

Fusion researchers are enthusiastic about participation in ITER — provided that additional resources are made available to pay for it. “I think the community is very excited about the possibility of rejoining ITER,” says Richard Hazeltine, director of the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Hazeltine criticized ITER before the US withdrawal, but thinks that the new design addresses his concerns.

The United States still has a long way to go before it could rejoin the project, cautions Anne Davies, director of the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences at the energy department. “We're just at the beginning stages of considering what our position should be,” she says. Congress and the administration must pledge their full support before US fusion researchers could resume participation, she adds.

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