26 March, 2014

Raffi Khatchadourian: Can an Audacious Plan to Create a New Energy Resource Help Save the Planet? : The New Yorker

Raffi Khatchadourian: Can an Audacious Plan to Create a New Energy Resource Help Save the Planet? : The New Yorker:

Two dozen engineers were seated around tables arranged in a
horseshoe, and the mood was sombre. A sense of crisis has come to
surround ITER like the concentric nebulae
of a dying sun. The project has been falling behind schedule almost
since it began—in 1993, it was thought that the machine could be ready
by 2010—and there will certainly be further delays. Morale is through
the floor, and one can expect cynicism, disagreements, black humor.
“There is anxiety here that it is all going to implode,” one physicist
told me. Many engineers and physicists at ITER
believe that the delays are self-inflicted, having little to do with
engineering or physics and everything to do with the way that ITER
is organized and managed. Key members of the technical staff have left;
others have taken “stress leave” to recuperate. Not long ago, the
director-general, Osamu Motojima, a Japanese physicist, who has run the
organization since 2010, ordered workmen to install at the headquarters’
entrance a granite slab proclaiming ITER’s presence. People call it a tombstone.