ITER is an international project aiming to produce sustained fusion energy, with a goal of generating 500 megawatts for up to 1000 seconds. It is a consortium of seven national and supranational parties, and is currently under construction at a cost of approximately $9.3 billion. If successful, ITER could be the first fusion power plant to produce more energy than it consumes. Fusion energy works by fusing together light atomic nuclei, and has the potential to generate more energy than nuclear fission, with the only byproduct being water. ITER is a tokamak project, surrounded by powerful magnetic coils, and if successful, could mean big things for nuclear fusion.
ITER was short for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, an international project to push the limits of fusion energy. The long name was eventually dropped due to the negative public connotations of the word ‘thermonuclear’, so the project is now known only as ‘ITER’, which also means ‘journey’ or ‘way’ in Latin. The project is a consortium of seven national and supranational parties: the European Union (EU), India, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, South Korea and the United States. Brazil will also participate, using Portugal’s role in the European Union as a proxy.
ITER’s goal is to produce a sustained fusion reaction, generating 500 megawatts for up to 1000 seconds. By comparison, the last major international fusion project, the Joint European Torus, produced about 16 megawatts of power for less than a second. As of 2009, ITER is currently under construction at a cost of approximately $9.3 billion and is expected to be completed by 2018 and operate for another 20 years, until 2038. If ITER is successful, it could be the first fusion power plant which produces more energy than it consumes, even if the heat generated in its core will not be used for the generation of electricity: its purpose is only experimental.
Fusion energy works by fusing together light atomic nuclei – hydrogen, deuterium, tritium and/or helium – and releasing the extra power contained in their nuclear bonds. This is in contrast to nuclear fission, the principle by which all existing nuclear power plants operate, whereby energy is generated by the splitting of heavy nuclei such as uranium, plutonium or thorium. Nuclear fusion has the potential to generate more energy than nuclear fission, not to mention it’s much cleaner: the only byproduct of the reaction is water. Fusion energy has been hailed as the holy grail of energy research, so achieving commercial fusion energy production has long been a goal of energy researchers, although even the most optimistic among them don’t expect the technology to be available before 2030, with 2050 as the most realistic estimate. ITER is a step in this direction.
ITER is a tokamak project, a Russian fusion reactor project that is a bull. The torus is surrounded by powerful magnetic coils, which trap a plasma (ionized gas) inside. This plasma is heated to great temperatures – over 100 million degrees Kelvin – using ohmic heating; the same mechanism that heats up a wire if an excessive electric current is passed through it. Around this temperature, nuclei begin to fuse, releasing energy. If the conditions are right, a nuclear chain reaction is started – as in a fission reactor, not as in an atomic bomb – and energy is produced. If the ITER experiments are successful, they could mean big things for nuclear fusion.
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