Euro THERMONUCLEAR REACTOR PROJECT is in TROUBLE

Oh just give them a blank cheque already.

Yes, that's right, lets further delay something important the world desperately needs. If everyone would stop trying to score political points off it and just concentrate on BUILDING THE DAMN THING it wouldn't be so far over budget!

So what have ITER done or not done ?!

The story states that the European Parliament has compained about ITER not managing funds properly, but it does not state what exactly ITER has done, beyond a "delayed disbursements".

Fill in that bit and you might have a proper story.

Of Course

ITER scientists claim that successful financial controls are just 15 years away.

Well its kind of like a big expensive power-hungry doughnut. We pump in money here - and - er - ah yes you see that faint glow? That's fusion right there! Cool isn't it?

What a shame ITER has turned into a mess and been used as a political football. I know we've been saying fusion power is just 50 years away for 50 years but if you look at the findings of the last decade I think we are, at long last, probably quite close. We're at the stage where creating and confining a plasma is hard and in terms of energy output we are getting close to break even. There's certainly a way to go still but none of it looks like it would be a show stopper.

I've been following the ITER project for years and like a lot of big government projects it seems to have suffered from stagnation and too many leaders. It's never really felt like the goal was to build a fusion power plant it was always to understand this or that aspect of fusion power generation which is a much harder sell.

Meanwhile

If governments in Europe had not shied away from fission and hadn't spent quite so much on subsidies which don't actually keep the wheels of industry turning, then we'd be a good deal richer with more to invest in research.

And despite all

this , in 25 yrs time when the scientists finally go "Huzzah, it works", no one will want one built near them because it has the word 'nuclear' on the side of the can.

And green peace et al will be against it because they like shivering in the dark when the wind stop blowing at night.

As a post script, the US congress bitched like hell at the cost of Hubble and its servicing missions. anyone remember the names of the nay sayers?

Proof of the intolerability of democratic decision making

Voting should be limited to replacing the dastards in charge, not allowed to decide anything that matters Who cares if the checks are late or too big. Did not these fools know that both would happen, when the insisted on cost sharing and control sharing, rather than rational competition-to-the-death that historically works so well to produce progress? Idealists out to be strangled at birth, so should believers, regardless of belief.

ITER was set up in the first place not because it made sense, but because it could be sold, sort of, to the publics in the few places capable of getting this done. The Europeans, not one of those few, ought to sit down and shut the fook up.