618 



in the cooperation. Nor would it give any of the partners any 

 oarticular edge over us. What international cooperation will do in 

 that case is to keep us well informed in a technological sense and 

 thus help us to maintain a competitive competence among equally 

 competent potential suppliers of future markets. 



If international cooperation is continued only through the phases 

 of scientific inquiry and generic technology development, with 

 disengagement of the partners or other common measures for protecting 

 proprietary interests as commercialization approaches, then the 

 cooperation need not limit the competitive advantages that can be 

 30ught and attained by any country. However, such scenarios and 

 consequences are not possible to predict. The pace of the 

 commercialization of fusion will probably be deliberate enough that 

 appropriate competitive adjustments can be made along the way. 



Will International Cooperation Reduce Our Costs? 



The great article of faith is that it will reduce our costs, and that 

 it will reduce everybody else's as well. The faith is held perhaps a 

 bit more strongly among program administrators and finance officials 

 than among technical people. There is a school of thought that thinks 

 an international collaborative project would be more expensive than 

 doing it within a single national program. The International Tokamak 

 Reactor (INTOR) workshop, for instance, was asked, "What are the 

 effects on cost and schedule of undertaking the INTOR project 

 internationally and partitioning the detail design and fabrication of 

 components, so each of the four parties could benefit from the 

 development of all advanced technologies involved?" The consensus was 

 that relative to a national project, such an international project 

 would cost about 70 percent more, require a larger staff by about 15 

 percent, and would require about two years longer to complete. 

 However, it is not clear that the question was asked in the right 

 way. For instance, it is doubtful that JET, with many partners in the 

 project, is costing 70 percent more than if it were, for example, 

 totally a United Kingdom project. Nevetheless, true or not, if a 

 major new machine is too expensive a project for any single national 

 program, but can be managed financially by two or three collaborating 

 together, then it does not matter if it is 70 percent more expensive 

 because there is no other way to do it. In that case it is a bargain 

 for each of the partners. That fact suggests that the answer to the 

 question is not so much, "Yes, it will reduce our costs," as it is, 

 "No, but it will allow us to maintain a broad program and to take 

 significant steps forward without increasing our costs." 



As to the next few years, there is little possibility that 

 cooperation will produce large annual savings because EC and Japanese 

 plans and budgets are committed to projects in train and thus 

 unavailable for major new initiatives that might create significant 

 savings. 



