WASHINGTON

An independent study that would have played a key role in determining the shape of US participation in the ITER project has collapsed, the first major victim of a legal impasse at the National Academy of Sciences over the status of its expert panels.

The United States will spend $55 million on ITER this year. The Department of Energy (DoE) had commissioned the study to help to decide what to do after the ITER engineering design assessment ends in July 1998 (see above).

Perhaps more importantly, from the department's point of view, the study would probably have endorsed at least some of ITER's achievements, making it easier to win congressional support for continued US participation.

Earlier this year, the DoE asked the National Research Council — the operating arm of the National Academies of Science and Engineering — to set up a panel to assess the ITER design by October, in time to help prepare the department's 1999 budget proposal for fusion energy sciences. But as a result of a recent court case the council and the DoE fear that they could face legal action under the Federal Advisory Committee Act if they appoint a panel in the usual way (see nature 387, 220; 1997).

Lawyers have been trying to design a study that would avoid the act's rules by putting a single investigator in charge. But they abandoned their efforts after being told by congressional staff that the outcome of such a process was unlikely to have much credibility in the Congress. Martha Krebs, assistant energy secretary, confirms that, as a result, the study will not now proceed.

The DoE will now have to rely on its own Fusion Energy Science Advisory Committee (FESAC) to assess ITER and plot a way forward. The latest ITER design was endorsed in April by a FESAC panel chaired by Robert Conn, dean of engineering at the University of California at San Diego (see nature 386, 745; 1997.

Another panel, led by Herman Grunder, director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, is now being asked to produce some recommendations for US involvement in an extended ITER design assessment.

Krebs is pragmatic about the setback. The academy review would have been helpful, she says, but advice from FESAC will have to do instead. “I believe we can make a strong case that the activities we'd do [under an extended design assessment] would be science-driven and would sustain our domestic capability in fusion.”

But, despite a more positive attitude towards fusion research in the Congress than in the past, selling future US involvement in ITER, already a tough task, is likely to become still more difficult. Although FESAC has some scientists from outside fusion research, the committee is seen primarily as the voice of the fusion community.