Fusion Project Selects San Diego as Its Home

Having failed in past bids to attract important scientific research projects, San Diego will today be named as the host city for a prestigious international fusion research program that could pump $200 million into the local economy over the next five years.

Officials associated with the $1-billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program will “make an announcement that San Diego has been chosen as the corporate headquarters site and the main research site for ITER,” James Lee, Gov. Pete Wilson’s deputy press secretary, confirmed Tuesday.

ITER officials also are scheduled to announce that the consortium’s executive director will reside in San Diego, and that satellite research facilities will be created in Japan and Germany. The satellite facilities will report to the executive director in San Diego, according to sources familiar with the ITER project.

San Diego’s selection as the headquarters for ITER is expected to generate scientific and academic prestige that will further build on the city’s growing reputation as a mecca for cutting-edge scientific research. “This puts San Diego now on the international science stage,” Mayor Maureen O’Connor said.

But civic and business leaders also are welcoming the economic lift that ITER will provide at a time when San Diego’s three main industries--defense, tourism and construction--have fallen on hard times.

“Everyone, from the governor on down, has become interested in seeing this happen in San Diego,” said Dan Pegg, president of the Economic Development Corp. “It’s delightful to see everybody, when they finally work together effectively, produce meaningful results.”

San Diego will receive an economic boost from the estimated 200 scientists and officials from around the world who will move to San Diego during the project’s five-year lifetime. The headquarters staff will buy services and supplies from local companies. And the visiting scientists will rent homes and shop in local malls.

The ITER headquarters is also expected to create about 50 jobs for San Diegans. And, a number of local high-tech companies are expected to reap economic benefits from having ITER in San Diego.

The unprecedented gathering of leading fusion researchers will spend the next five years designing a reactor vessel that could withstand the tremendous heat required to harness fusion energy. Construction of an actual reactor, which is not included in the ITER budget, would cost an estimated $5 billion to $6 billion. An actual reactor, however, would probably not be built for at least a decade.

Although some researchers and officials will begin to arrive in the fall, the big wave of ITER scientists won’t arrive until early in 1992.

Nearly 2 dozen scientists and officials from the U.S., Japan, the Soviet Union and the European Community settled on San Diego during a two-day meeting that ended Tuesday in Washington. The ITER group is scheduled to arrive in San Diego this morning for two days of meetings with local officials.

The ITER headquarters and research facility will be situated in one of two existing office buildings near General Atomics, a privately held company that is recognized worldwide for its fusion research. General Atomics has built a $400-million fusion research facility in the Sorrento Valley.

Rep. Bill Lowery said the decision to create satellite facilities in Japan and Germany could reduce the number of scientists who will work in San Diego.

“We clearly would have preferred to have the engineering design facility in one place, and San Diego was clearly the best location,” Lowery said. “But San Diego will still be the flagship.”

General Atomics, along with Science Applications International Corp., General Dynamics and UC San Diego made up the core group responsible for luring ITER to San Diego. But the ITER announcement also marked a decided triumph for California, which has lost highly publicized bids to attract scientific consortia during the past decade.

Intrastate bickering was partly to blame for California’s failure to win an atom smasher and a highly desirable computer industry consortium that settled in Texas, along with an earthquake research laboratory that settled in Buffalo, N.Y.

In recent weeks, civic, business and university leaders have applauded Wilson and the state’s congressional delegation for coalescing on the San Diego proposal and providing a unified front.

In March, for example, Wilson announced the inclusion of a $400,000 state grant that would help defray the cost of expensive computer work stations that ITER scientists will use to design the highly complex fusion reactor. Scientists associated with the project have praised the state’s usually fractious congressional delegation for uniting on the San Diego bid.

The announcement ends a fierce bidding process that pitted San Diego against Naka, Japan and Garching, Germany, two cities that are home to world-renowned fusion research centers.

San Diego in January triumphed over several other U.S. cities in Texas, Massachusetts and Tennessee that had hoped to snare ITER’s headquarters. With today’s announcement, ITER officials picked San Diego despite the fact that Germany and Japan had offered dramatic subsidies to cut housing costs for visiting scientists.

To counteract those government subsidies, a coalition of organizations and businesses in San Diego has raised $700,000 in donations toward a goal of $1 million that will be used to subsidize housing for foreign scientists.

The drive has drawn substantial support from the city of San Diego, San Diego Gas & Electric, Gray Cary Ames & Fray, Luce Forward Hamilton & Scripps, and Johnson & Higgins of California, according to Joanne Pastula, an executive with John Burnham & Co., which is helping to secure donations.

The three ITER research facilities, to be funded by the U.S., Japan, the Soviet Union and the European Community, will work together to complete design and engineering plans for a commercial-scale fusion reactor.

O’Connor attributed the city’s healthy relationship with the Soviet Union as one reason why the project will come to San Diego. “The fact that the Soviets were aware of San Diego, and liked San Diego, I think was a big plus,” O’Connor said.