Declaring that the fusion community “sees itself on the threshold of a giant step forward,” the Department of Energy’s independent Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee has strongly endorsed a recommendation by its Burning Plasma Strategy Panel that the US negotiate to rejoin the multibillion-dollar International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project. The endorsement came at the end of an 11 September meeting in which FESAC reviewed the 48-page report titled A Burning Plasma Program Strategy to Advance Fusion Energy that recommended rejoining ITER or, as a fallback position, building a smaller US project called the Fusion Ignition Research Experiment (FIRE).
The recommendation that the US enter negotiations to rejoin ITER was enthusiastically embraced by Ray Orbach, director of DOE’s Office of Science. Speaking before the National Research Council’s Burning Plasma Assessment Committee a week after the FESAC meeting, Orbach said, “The issue for us is how do we approach providing power by...
