Energy. Fresh start for fusion project as new leader shakes up management.

Last week, ITER, the 16 billion international effort aiming to prove the viability of fusion as an energy source, shook off nagging worries that soaring costs and management problems, combined with Europe's economic woes, could lead to the down-sizing or even killing of the experimental reactor. ITER's governing council fi nally approved the project's so-called Baseline, an extensive document outlining its cost, schedule, and design, and offi cially named Osamu Motojima, former director-general of Japan's National Institute for Fusion Science , as ITER's new leader. The major steps forward brought almost audible sighs of relief from fusion scientists , who can now look forward to 2019, when ITER is supposed to produce its fi rst plasma. " I was beginning to wonder if we were ever going to nail down cost and schedule. Europe had been dragging its feet, " says Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Abingdon, U.K. " We're over this nasty hump. Yes, ITER is going to cost a lot of money, but we're going to do it. " That hump included a fi erce debate over how the European Union which is responsible for 45% of ITER's budget, would cover a 1.4 billion shortfall in short-term funding for the increasingly expensive project. In June, E.U. member states declined to inject new money into ITER, recommending instead the use of funds already allocated to other research efforts. This outraged non fusion scientists, and in July the European Commission rejected the advice; current plans are to take just 400 million from existing research budgets and fi nd the rest from money allocated to agricultural subsidies and other uses. In an attempt to forestall future budget battles, the ITER Council last week placed a cap on the overall budget of the reactor, to be built in Cadarache, France. Building ITER on time and on budget will be a " tough job, " Motojima admits. He isn't moving slowly, however. The day after his appointment, Motojima announced plans to overhaul ITER's operations. A management review requested by the ITER Council had earlier this year criti-ENERGY Quantum computing may fi nally be ready to grow up. Over the past 3 decades, physicists have learned to use the quantum behavior of atoms to store and process a handful of bits of information. But they've never managed to scale up quantum computers the way the computer industry has …