ITER

Assembled from 51 blocks · 2 evidence · 34 related

1. Story
2. ITER is a single very large tokamak under construction at Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, near Cadarache in southern France, built by a seven-member international collaboration. Its scientific goal is to produce a burning deuterium-tritium plasma at large scale, not to generate electricity: ITER has no turbine and no generator. Its schedule has slipped repeatedly. Under the updated baseline presented to the ITER Council in June 2024, the start of research operations is a stated target of 2034, full magnetic energy and plasma current in 2036, and the start of deuterium-tritium operation in 2039 — respectively three and four years later than the 2016 reference baseline, and much later than earlier plans. The updated baseline also changed the plasma-facing first wall material from beryllium to tungsten and brought forward installation of the divertor and blanket shield blocks so that the machine is more complete at first operation. All of these are programme targets and design decisions, not predictions of outcome.
3. Knowledge
4. Tokamak (toroidal magnetic confinement)
5. Tritium breeding blanket
6. ITER
7. Tritium
8. Plasma-facing materials and first wall
9. Connections
10. Plasma-facing materials and first wall
11. Tritium breeding blanket
12. Tritium
13. Tokamak (toroidal magnetic confinement)
14. Joint European Torus (JET)
15. ITER adopts the 2016 reference baseline
16. ITER presents an updated project baseline to the ITER Council
17. ITER's declared target date for the start of deuterium-tritium operation
18. ITER
19. Breakeven
20. ITER presents an updated project baseline to the ITER Council
21. Lithium (as breeding feedstock)
22. ITER
23. Tritium
24. ITER's declared target date for the start of deuterium-tritium operation
25. Tokamak (toroidal magnetic confinement)
26. Inertial confinement fusion
27. ITER
28. Tritium breeding blanket
29. Private fusion sector
30. JET's DTE1 campaign sets the first deuterium-tritium fusion power record
31. JET's DTE2 campaign releases 59 MJ in a single pulse
32. NIF achieves target gain greater than unity for the first time
33. JET sets the single-pulse fusion energy record of 69.26 MJ
34. JET ceases plasma operations after 105,842 pulses
35. ITER's declared target date for the start of deuterium-tritium operation
36. Fusion triple product (n·T·τ_E)
37. Tritium
38. Deuterium
39. Stellarator
40. ITER
41. Joint European Torus (JET)
42. EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak)
43. JET's DTE1 campaign sets the first deuterium-tritium fusion power record
44. JET's DTE2 campaign releases 59 MJ in a single pulse
45. JET sets the single-pulse fusion energy record of 69.26 MJ
46. ITER presents an updated project baseline to the ITER Council
47. EAST sustains a high-confinement plasma for 1,066 seconds
48. Commonwealth Fusion Systems' declared target for net energy gain at SPARC
49. Evidence
50. ITER's current programme targets, the magnitude of slippage against the 2016 reference baseline, and the change of first wall material to tungsten
51. ITER is designed to test breeding blanket mock-ups rather than to operate a closed breeding cycle, and no fusion device has yet demonstrated tritium self-sufficiency