ITER, the world’s largest thermonuclear reactor worth $28 billion, will start operating in 15 years

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is complete, but will not operate for another 15 years, scientists have reported. The world’s largest fusion reactor, which was assembled in France, was originally to start working in 2020but now the launch has been postponed to 2039.

«Certainly, delaying ITER is not a step in the right direction. If we talk about the impact of nuclear fusion on the problems that humanity is currently facing, we should not wait for nuclear fusion to solve them. It’s not reasonable,» says Pietro Barabaschi, the project’s CEO.

The ITER fusion reactor was created in cooperation with 35 countries: all European Union countries, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, China, India, and the United States. It contains the world’s most powerful magnet, which makes it capable of generating a magnetic field 280,000 times more powerful than the one that protects the Earth.

ITER cost $28 billion to build. Initially, it was planned to cost about $5 billion, but now, due to numerous delays, its budget has exceeded $22 billion, plus $5 billion to cover additional costs. The high costs have caused a 15-year delay.

For more than 70 years, scientists have been trying to harness the energy of nuclear fusion, the process by which stars burn. By combining hydrogen atoms to form helium under extremely high pressures and temperatures, fusion creates energy from matter, and does so without environmental impact.

The most common design of fusion reactors, the tokamak, works by superheating plasma (one of the four states of matter consisting of positive ions and negatively charged free electrons), which is held in the reactor chamber by powerful magnetic fields. Fusion reactors require very high temperatures (many times higher than the solar temperature) because they must operate at much lower pressures than in the cores of stars. It is also extremely difficult to to keep turbulent and superheated plasma for a sufficiently long time to allow nuclear fusion to take place. The first tokamak was created in 1958, but none of them has yet reproduced more energy than it consumed — another type of reactor was more successful.

Source: Live Science