The governing board of the world’s flagship fusion project has put off the release of a new cost and schedule estimate until June 2016, after the seven members decided to conduct an independent review of the ITER project management’s assessment.
At a mid-November meeting at the project site in Cadarache, France, the ITER Council received a new baseline estimate endorsed by ITER director general Bernard Bigot, which both he and the council declined to make public. The last official baseline, prepared in 2008, put completion of the mammoth project in 2019, at an estimated cost of €13 billion ($13.8 billion). But officials have acknowledged that the date will slip by several years and the cost will grow.
Bigot says he presented to the council multiple baseline scenarios, ranging from a best technically achievable schedule to one in which resources are kept to what the partners have currently agreed to contribute....
