The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a 35-country effort to create electricity from nuclear fusion, has scrapped its project plans and pushed back the operation of its tokamak by at least eight years.
Major breakthrough for nuclear fusion energy – BBC News
Tokamaks are typically designed around a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber, inside which gases are subjected to extreme heat and pressure and become a plasma. Strong magnets are used to keep the hot plasma away from the chamber walls, and the heat is used to boil water into steam that turns turbines to make electricity.
ITER has built what it claims is the world's largest tokamak and hopes it will achieve a deuterium-tritium plasma – where fusion conditions are maintained mostly by internal fusion heating, rather than having to constantly supply energy. The organization aims to produce 500MW of fusion power from 50MW of input, as a demo that lights the way for commercial machines.
ITER Director General Pietro Barabaschi yesterday outlined [PDF] a new project baseline to replace the one in use since 2016. The older document envisaged "first plasma" in 2025 – but only as "a short, low-energy machine test, with relatively minimal scientific value." " A planned series of experiments would continue until 2033.
