Nuclear fusion: The one relationship Russia and the West just can’t break

SAINT-PAUL-LEZ-DURANCE, France — Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has ripped apart Moscow’s ties with the EU and the U.S. on everything from energy to trade to travel — but there’s one partnership they can’t escape.

Tucked away in a quiet sun-soaked corner of southern France, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) — an effort to harness the power of nuclear fusion to unleash vast amounts of clean energy — continues to purr along with the participation of Russian scientists and Russian technology.

Earlier this month, scientists at ITER hailed a major breakthrough announced by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which said it had overcome a major barrier — producing more energy from a fusion experiment than was put in.

The 35-nation ITER — born out of U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1985 meeting after decades of Cold War tensions — has no way of removing a member gone rogue; there’s no path to kicking Russia out of the experiment without torpedoing the entire scheme.

The €44 billion project aims to test nuclear fusion — a process occurring in the center of stars — as a viable source of carbon-free energy that’s minimally radioactive. By injecting hot plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius into a device and confining it with magnetic fields, hydrogen nuclei fuse into a helium nucleus and additional neutrons, releasing huge amounts of energy.

The EU shoulders around half of ITER’s costs and manages its participation through the bloc’s Barcelona-based Fusion 4 Europe (F4E) agency; India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and the U.S. each have a roughly 9 percent share.

As an active participant in ITER, Russia still has around 50 staff, including engineers, working onsite.

Immediately after Moscow launched its full-scale assault on Ukraine in February, the project was left in a tight spot, especially as Russian government representatives form part of the high-level decision-making board, the ITER Council, alongside their European and American counterparts.

“It’s a difficult balance between condemning a member and facing the consequences for the project,” said ITER Communication Officer Sabina Griffith, who adds that there were initially intensive discussions about how to respond. Staff even briefly discussed putting a banner on the project’s website condemning the war, before scrapping the idea.

Even if “the organization itself is apolitical … many people were questioning” what to do after the invasion began, according to ITER’s chief engineer Alain Bécoulet, who added that there was “a lot of sadness” among the staff.

“The political situation so far is stable, [with] all members … declaring that they want to continue to work together,” he said, adding that the first ITER Council meeting after the invasion in June was “very constructive.”

ITER Council members again “reaffirmed their strong belief in the value of the ITER mission” when they met at the site for their latest gathering in October.

The experiment — over budget and over deadline — has already had its fair share of controversies. France’s nuclear safety authority in January suspended the assembly of the fusion reactor over safety concerns. F4E has been plagued by accusations of a high-pressure and overwork culture that critics have linked to at least one suicide.

Unlike Geneva-based particle physics laboratory CERN — a collaborative research center that suspended its ties with Russia after the war began — ITER is an international agreement like the U.N., making it hard to suspend Moscow, said Bécoulet.

That’s because up to 90 percent of the funding comes not in the form of cash but “in-kind” contributions of equipment, with participant countries each manufacturing a one-of-a-kind bespoke piece of the overall reactor that is then put together like a giant puzzle.

While the set-up was designed to create specialized fusion expertise across the world and stimulate domestic manufacturing, it now means that if one member doesn’t deliver a part, the entire project could collapse, wasting billions.

Even if they wanted to, countries couldn’t formally kick Russia out of the project, as there’s no clause in ITER’s constitution that would allow them to do so — instead, every other country would have to pull out.

Going nuclear

But that doesn’t mean the project hasn’t been impacted by Russia’s war.

For one, Western sanctions and Moscow’s counter-sanctions have made it a minefield to procure Russian-made parts, according to Bécoulet.

“It turns out 2022 is one very important year in terms of Russian deliveries” for the project, he said, with Moscow producing crucial parts including busbars — aluminum bars feeding the reactor with a huge electric current — and a 200-ton ring-shaped magnet that shapes the plasma and keeps it suspended in the reactor, called a poloidal field coil.

Transporting the busbars by truck and the field coil — which is on its way from St. Petersburg to Marseille — by ship required “more paperwork, more justification to explain to the various European countries that no, we are not subject to sanctions — we have derogations,” he said. The “painful” process delayed deliveries by up to two months, he added.

It also left Russian staff in the lurch, including Moscow-born assembly engineer Vladimir Tronza, who’s worked onsite since 2016.

“In the beginning, everyone was like, ‘What’s going to happen? Should we look for another job? Should we pack and go back?’” he said, adding that Russian staff members were initially concerned that Moscow would exit the project.

But Tronza said he hasn’t heard of Russian staff going home, with the “majority not interested to go back” given many have settled in southeastern France.

“Collaboration is important — it’s important to keep the ties and … talk,” he said, adding that the project is “a global good.”