The world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor began to be assembled on Tuesday in Cadarache, south of France.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) consortium is a joint effort by Japan, India, the European Union, the United States, Russia, China and South Korea.
Bernard Bigot, ITER’s Director-General said giving an estimate of how much the project would cost because much depended on the contribution of several members, “and everybody could understand that a workforce price in California is not exactly the same as in Mumbai.”
ITER will be the first fusion device to produce net energy, maintain fusion for long periods of time and test the integrated technologies, materials, and physics regimes necessary for the commercial production of fusion-based electricity, according to the consortium.
The vast international experiment is designed to demonstrate that nuclear fusion can be a viable source of energy.
Scientists have long sought to mimic the process of nuclear fusion that occurs inside the sun, arguing that it could provide an almost limitless source of cheap, safe and clean electricity. Unlike in existing fission reactors, which split plutonium or uranium atoms, there’s no risk of an uncontrolled chain reaction with fusion and it doesn’t produce long-lived radioactive waste.
A joint project to explore the technology was first proposed at a summit between US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, with the aim of “utilizing controlled thermonuclear fusion for peaceful purposes … for the benefit for all mankind.”
It took more than two decades for work to begin. The project’s members settled on a design that uses a doughnut-shaped device called a tokamak to trap hydrogen that’s been heated to 150 million degrees Celsius (270 million Fahrenheit) for long enough to allow atoms to fuse together.
The process results in the release of large amounts of heat. While ITER won’t generate electricity, scientists hope it will demonstrate that such a fusion reactor can produce more energy than it consumes.
There are other fusion experiments, but ITER’s design is widely considered the most advanced and practical. Scientists won’t know until 2035, following a decade of testing and upgrades, whether the device actually works as intended.
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