ITER

Experimental thermonuclear fusion reactor being built jointly by the European Union, the United States, China, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea. It is located at Cadarache in southern France. The treaty authorizing the funding of the project was signed in November 2006 and the machine is due to beginning running in 2016.

Such reactors subject deuterium and tritium (rare isotopes of hydrogen) to temperatures of 10 million°C (18 million°F) or more in order to cause the nuclei of the atoms to fuse, forming helium and releasing energy. So far fusion reactors have succeeded in producing only short bursts of power.

It is intended that ITER will be able to produce 500 MW of power for up to 500 seconds continuously. The reactor is of tokamak design, consisting of a hollow torus (ring) in which magnetic fields bottle up the electrically charged nuclei and electrons, holding them together long enough for the nuclei to fuse.