FPN11-39

FESAC Meeting of July 28, 2011

July 30, 2011

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC) held a one-day public meeting on July 28 in Gaithersburg Maryland. Office of Science Director Bill Brinkman opened the meeting. Brinkman told the FESAC that the U.S. contribution to ITER would likely have to grow from its current level of $80M in FY2011 and hoped-for level of $105M in FY 2012 to a level of about $300M in Fy2013 and maintained at that level for about 3 years. He expressed concern that it was going to be very difficult to obtain that degree of increase in the present fiscal climate in Washington and urged the community to actively shore up support in Congress.

Other comments on ITER were offered by Ed Synakowski, head of the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (OFES) and Tom Vanek, OFES staff for ITER. They indicated that, as a result of the earthquake in Japan and ITER budget uncertainties in Europe, they expected a further slippage in the ITER schedule of about one year, from late 2019 to late 2020 for first operations. The ITER Organization is currently reassessing the construction schedule with the aim of presenting a new schedule to the ITER Council at its next meeting in November. Vanek, however, expressed doubt that the evaluation would be complete by that time. Vanek indicated that, as result of a recent review of the U.S. ITER effort, it seemed likely that the U.S. cost for ITER would be at or near the high end of the current official U.S. estimate, which is a range of between $1.45B and $2.2B. The U.S. will have spent $215M on ITER by the end of FY2011.

Mike Zarnstorff from PPPL presented the results of a study on the opportunities for U.S scientists to collaborate on facilities overseas. Synakowski indicated his view that such collaboration would allow the U.S. to do research on issues otherwise inaccessible on U.S. facilities. Several members of FESAC expressed concern that the current U.S strategy of planning to send U.S. resources abroad potentially might lead to an erosion of U.S. capabililties in fusion generally. Synakowski expressed his view that it was more important to do whatever was necessary to make fusion succeed "globally" rather than to focus on the success of the U.S. program. A new charge was given to FESAC to assess opportunities and methods by which the U.S. could take advantage of working on international facilities on "long-pulse, steady-state research in superconducting advanced tokamaks and stellarators; in steady-state confinement and control science; and in plasma-wall interactions". FESAC member Dale Meade was appointed to chair a FESAC panel to carry out this study, which is due by January 31, 2012. A second FESAC panel is being set up to assess the research and facilities needed "to fill gaps in order to create the basis for a demonstration fusion reactor ." That panel will use as input a soon-to-be-completed study by Charles Kessel et al. that has been underway for the past year. Kessel provided a summary of that study at the meeting.