38 Facts About ITER

1.

ITER is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject aimed at creating energy by replicating, on Earth, the fusion processes of the Sun.

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2.

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.

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3.

ITER's stated purpose is scientific research, and technological demonstration of a large fusion reactor, without electricity generation.

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4.

ITER's goals are to achieve enough fusion to produce 10 times as much thermal output power as thermal power absorbed by the plasma for short time periods; to demonstrate and test technologies that would be needed to operate a fusion power plant including cryogenics, heating, control and diagnostics systems, and remote maintenance; to achieve and learn from a burning plasma; to test tritium breeding; and to demonstrate the safety of a fusion plant.

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5.

ITER is funded and run by seven member parties: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States.

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6.

ITER's planned successor, the EUROfusion-led DEMO, is expected to be one of the first fusion reactors to produce electricity in an experimental environment.

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7.

ITER will be testing tritium breeding blanket technology that would allow a future fusion reactor to create its own tritium and thus be self-sufficient.

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8.

Reactor was expected to take 10 years to build and ITER had planned to test its first plasma in 2020 and achieve full fusion by 2023, however the schedule is to test first plasma in 2025 and full fusion in 2035.

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9.

The DEMO-class reactors that are planned to follow ITER are intended to demonstrate the net production of electricity.

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10.

One of the primary ITER objectives is to achieve a state of "burning plasma".

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11.

However, the ITER project was gaining momentum in political circles due to the quiet work being done by two physicists, the American scientist Alvin Trivelpiece who served as Director of the Office of Energy Research in the 1980s and the Russian scientist Evgeny Velikhov who would become head of the Kurchatov Institute for nuclear research.

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12.

At this same time, the group of ITER partners was expanding, with China and South Korea joining the project in 2003 and India formally joined in 2005.

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13.

In June 2005, it was officially announced that ITER would be built in the South of France at the Cadarache site.

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14.

The ITER Council is responsible for the overall direction of the organization and decides such issues as the budget.

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15.

In January 2019, the ITER Council voted unanimously to reappoint Bigot for a second five-year term.

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16.

ITER's stated mission is to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power as a large-scale, carbon-free source of energy.

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17.

Objectives of the ITER project are not limited to creating the nuclear fusion device but are much broader, including building necessary technical, organizational, and logistical capabilities, skills, tools, supply chains, and culture enabling management of such megaprojects among participating countries, bootstrapping their local nuclear fusion industries.

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18.

When ITER becomes operational, it will be the largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment in use with a plasma volume of 840 cubic meters, surpassing the Joint European Torus by a factor of 8.

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19.

ITER uses cooling equipment like a cryopump to cool the magnets to close to absolute zero.

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20.

ITER will use a deuterium-tritium fuel, and while deuterium is abundant in nature, tritium is much rarer because it is a hydrogen isotope with a half-life of just 12.

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21.

ITER is based on magnetic confinement fusion that uses magnetic fields to contain the fusion fuel in plasma form.

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22.

In 2016, ITER announced a partnership with Australia for "technical cooperation in areas of mutual benefit and interest", but without Australia becoming a full member.

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23.

The current Chairman of the ITER Council is Won Namkung, and the acting ITER Director-General is Eisuke Tada.

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24.

China's contribution to ITER is managed through the China International Nuclear Fusion Energy Program or the CNDA.

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25.

ITER-India is a special project run by India's Institute for Plasma Research.

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26.

India's deliverables to the ITER project include the cryostat, in-vessel shielding, cooling and cooling water systems.

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27.

ITER Korea was established in 2007 under Korea's National Fusion Research Institute and the organization is based in Daejeon, South Korea.

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28.

US ITER is part of the US Department of Energy and is managed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

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29.

US ITER is responsible for both the design and manufacturing of components for the ITER project, and American involvement includes contributions to the tokamak cooling system, the diagnostics systems, the electron and ion cyclotron heating transmission lines, the toroidal and central solenoid magnet systems, and the pellet injection systems.

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30.

In 2006, the ITER Agreement was signed on the basis of an estimated cost of €5.

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31.

At the June 2005 conference in Moscow the participating members of the ITER cooperation agreed on the following division of funding contributions for the construction phase: 45.

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32.

Construction of the ITER tokamak has been compared to the assembly of “a giant three-dimensional puzzle” because the parts are manufactured around the world and then shipped to France for assembly.

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33.

The French industrial conglomerate Daher was awarded more than €100 million in logistics contracts for ITER, which includes the shipment of the heavy components from the different manufacturers around the world.

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34.

In 2019, the Chinese consortium led by China Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation signed a contract for machine assembly at ITER that was the biggest nuclear energy contract ever signed by a Chinese company in Europe.

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35.

ITER project has been criticized for issues such as its possible environmental impacts, its usefulness as a response to climate change, the design of its tokamak, and how the experiment's objectives have been expressed.

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36.

Proponents believe that much of the ITER criticism is misleading and inaccurate, in particular the allegations of the experiment's "inherent danger".

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37.

Supporters of ITER emphasize that the only way to test ideas for withstanding the intense neutron flux is to subject materials experimentally to that flux, which is one of the primary missions of ITER and the IFMIF, and both facilities will be vitally important to that effort.

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38.

The purpose of ITER is to explore the scientific and engineering questions that surround potential fusion power stations.

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