ITER: an unprecedented international collaboration for developing fusion energy
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Cadarache is the location of a mediaeval castle deep in the heart of Provence, France about 70 km north of the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The castle commands the confluence of the Verdon river with the larger Durance river. But Cadarache is now also the location where the largest scientific collaboration of all times is building ITER! Its goal is to demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of fusion energy, building on several decades of worldwide research on the physics and technology of magnetic confinement of hydrogen gases heated at the huge temperatures required for fusion. ITER is the world’s largest and most complex energy research project undertaken with the prospect of an inexhaustible energy respectful of the environment without the risks present in fission reactors. To meet this challenge an international collaboration of currently seven partners (EU, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States) has been established in 2007 for 40 years in order to build and operate ITER and share its scientific results. The presentation will summarise the motivation, the objectives, the design foundations and the status of the project. It will give examples of major achievements obtained recently. Among these, an outstanding result obtained collectively is the progress in the manufacture and delivery of huge superconducting magnets, which confine the plasma. The assembly of the machine has started and the first plasma is expected at the very end of 2025.
In a second part, the presentation will address the novel physics issues, which arise in hot magnetically confined plasmas reaching temperatures of about 200 million degrees. A non-linear turbulence develops on multi-scales characteristic of the Larmor radii of electrons and ions of the plasma. It can give rise to an auto organisation process on a much larger scale with deep implications on the plasma performance. Similar behaviours are observed in the interior of the sun but also in gaseous planets and even in the Earth atmosphere.