Officials of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France, building what is called the most complex human project ever, said Thursday that construction of the $22 billion hydrogen fusion power machine is now 50 percent complete.
Agreements that kicked off the ITER project were signed in 2006 with funding now coming from 35 nations. Credit for its initial conception as a joint project is being given to a 1985 leadership summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Russian leader Michael Gorbachev. It also found support from French President Jacques Chirac, U.S. President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Monmohan Singh. The construction project in France is currently supported by a core group – the European Union, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States – where most of the design and component fabrication is taking place.
It is a project with enormous potential and a nearly limitless supply of deuterium and tritium fuel. Deuterium is “easily extracted from seawater and tritium, which is bred from lithium inside the fusion reactor,” ITER noted. “The supply of fusion fuel for industry and megacities is abundant, enough for millions of years.”
The process heats a plasma to temperatures is ten times hotter than the core of the sun at 150 million degrees Celsius. It takes place inside a tokamak, a donut-shaped machine surrounded by giant magnets that are cooled to minus 269 degrees Celsius – “cold as interstellar space,” ITER said.
That kind of energy promises to support an entirely new heat supply that could be used for generating electricity, potentially displacing or upending the current generation mix. The ITER project is designed to prove that fusion power can be built on a commercial scale at affordable prices. It would provide “carbon-free and environmentally sustainable” energy, ITER said. “Much more powerful than fossil fuel, a pineapple-sized amount of hydrogen offers as much fusion energy as 10,000 metric tons of coal,” according to the release.
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