ITER is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject aimed at creating energy through a fusion process similar to that of the Sun. Upon completion of construction of the main reactor and first plasma, planned for late 2025, it will be the world's largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment and the largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. It is being built next to the Cadarache facility in southern France. ITER will be the largest of more than 100 fusion reactors built since the 1950s, with ten times the plasma volume of any other tokamak operating today.
Small-scale model of ITER
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva Summit in 1985
Aerial view of the ITER site in 2018
ITER construction status in 2018
Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei, usually deuterium and tritium, combine to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles. The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or absorption of energy. This difference in mass arises due to the difference in nuclear binding energy between the atomic nuclei before and after the reaction. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers active or main-sequence stars and other high-magnitude stars, where large amounts of energy are released.
The Sun is a main-sequence star, and thus releases its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. In its core, the Sun fuses 500 million tonnes of hydrogen each second.
The Tokamak à configuration variable, research fusion reactor, at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland).
