On the road to unlimited energy, the world's most complex science experiment encounters a few potholes

 

Geneva was cold and gray when air force one touched down in November 1985. President Ronald Reagan had come to meet Mikhail Gorbachev, the newly appointed leader of the Soviet Union. Reagan was convinced that the risk of catastrophic nuclear war was high, and he wanted to reduce the two superpowers’ swollen arsenals. Gorbachev also recognized that the arms race was strangling the Soviet economy.

 

Yet the tête-à-tête quickly degenerated. Reagan lectured Gorbachev on the history of Soviet aggression. Gorbachev attacked Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, an ambitious plan to knock incoming nuclear weapons out of the sky. Negotiations nearly broke down. At five in the morning, the two sides agreed to a joint statement with no firm commitments. At the bottom—almost as a footnote—Reagan and Gorbachev inserted a gauzy pledge to develop a new source of energy “for the benefit of all mankind.”

 

In Brief

• The ITER fusion reactor promises to be a landmark step on the road toward unlimited clean energy. Once running, the machine will produce 10 times the amount of energy needed to power it.
 

• Yet for all its promise, the ITER project is in trouble. Billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, the reactor will not start power-production experiments until 2026 at the earliest.
 

• The complex reasons behind the troubles include unforeseen engineering difficulties and the baroque bureaucratic squabbles of a global partnership of seven major stakeholders.
 

• Critics contend that ITER has become a pie-in-the-sky boondoggle whose only purpose is to suck money away from productive clean-energy research projects like wind and solar energy.