The project’s previous baseline—its timeframe and the benchmarks within it—was established in 2016. The global pandemic that started in 2020 interrupted much of ITER’s ongoing operations, delaying matters further.
As reported by Scientific American, ITER’s cost is four times initial estimates, with the most recent numbers putting the project at over $22 billion. Speaking at a press conference earlier today, Pietro Barabaschi, ITER’s director general, explained the cause of the delays and the updated project baseline for the experiment.
“Since October 2020, it has been made clear, publicly and to our stakeholders, that First Plasma in 2025 was no longer achievable,” Barabaschi said. “The new baseline has been redesigned to prioritize the Start of Research Operations.”
Barabaschi said that the new baseline will mitigate operational risks and prepare the device for operations using deuterium-tritium, one type of fusion reaction. Instead of a first plasma in 2025 as a “brief, low-energy machine test,” he said, more time will be dedicated to commissioning the experiment and it will be given more external heating capacity. Full magnetic energy is pushed back three years, from 2033 to 2036. Deuterium-deuterium fusion operations will remain on schedule for roughly 2035, while the start of deuterium-tritium operations will be delayed four years, from 2035 to 2039.
