The troubled multibillion-euro nuclear-fusion project ITER has improved its performance and management, and the United States should continue to support the experiment at least until 2018, the US Department of Energy (DOE) said in a report to Congress released on 26 May. After that, the agency said, the country should re-evaluate its position.
ITER is an unprecedented collaboration between the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States. Its ambitious goal is to show that fusing hydrogen nuclei to make helium — the same process that heats up the Sun and powers hydrogen bombs — is a technologically feasible way to produce electricity. The experiment is under construction at a site in St-Paul-lez-Durance in southern France, but the work is more than a decade behind schedule, and its costs have spiralled far above the original budget.
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