ITER
The United States is a partner with five other countries and the European Union in the construction and operation of this large international tokamak, which is under construction in Cadarache, France, to demonstrate fusion as a source of clean and abundant energy. The partners with the United States are the People's Republic of China, the European Union (represented by Euratom), India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation. Buildings and infrastructure required to produce first plasma in 2025 are 75% complete on ITER (as of 2021), which represents the next major step in the development of fusion power. The fusion power that ITER is designed to produce in the middle of the next decade is to be 10 times greater than the external power delivered to heat the ITER plasma.
PPPL is designing and building diagnostic equipment and developing scientific data and software coding for the international facility. (See below.)
At right: Photo of a sector of the ITER vacuum vessel that will confine the plasma that fuels fusion reactions
Photo of a sector of the ITER vacuum vessel that will confine the plasma that fuels fusion reactions.
What is ITER?
ITER (Latin for "the way") will play a critical role advancing the worldwide availability of energy from fusion — the power source of the sun and the stars.
To produce practical amounts of fusion power on earth, heavy forms, or isotopes, of hydrogen are joined together at high temperature with an accompanying production of heat energy. The fuel must be held at a temperature of over 100 million degrees Celsius. At these high temperatures, the electrons are detached from the nuclei of the atoms, in a state of matter called plasma. The nuclei are then brought together to release enormous amounts of energy.
U.S. and PPPL Contributions to ITER
U.S. Contributions to ITER are a DOE Office of Science Major Item of Equipment (MIE) project. The project consists of the procurement of hardware (including supporting R&D and design) and assignment of personnel (U.S. engineers and scientists) to the ITER site in Cadarache, France. Included are Field Teams in the ITER parties, and cash contributions to the ITER Organization for the U.S. share of common expenses such as personnel infrastructure, assembly and installation.
PPPL contributions to ITER have included delivery of three quarters of the components for the steady-state electrical network of the huge fusion energy experiment. The Laboratory also leads the design and construction of seven diagnostics that will analyze the behavior of ITER plasmas. PPPL physicist Richard Hawryluk, a major contributor to fusion research, served as ITER Deputy Director-General from 2011 to 2013.
All U.S. ITER project activities are managed by the U.S. ITER Project Office at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The project is a collaboration of DOE laboratories, universities, and industry.
Click to go to the international ITER website at www.iter.org and the US ITER website: www.usiter.org
Visit the latest ITER Newsline and PPPL’s ITER Fact Sheet.
Rendering of fusion plasma inside the ITER tokamak
Visualization of magnetic field lines in W7-X stellarator
Other Devices and Collaborations
PPPL scientists have been a part of international tokamak collaborations since the Lab's inception. We participate in the day-to-day-operation of major devices, including DIII-D in San Diego, EAST in China, JET in the United Kingdom, KSTAR in South Korea, the LHD in Japan, and the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) device in Germany.
We are, for example, the leading U.S. collaborator on the W7-X project and have designed and delivered a set of magnetic coils that fine-tune the shape of the plasma in fusion experiments. We have conducted lithium-coating experiments to prevent the loss of heat on the EAST and KSTAR tokamaks and have stationed physicists at DIII-D to plan and conduct experiments.
We also actively participate in the DOE’s Innovation Network for Fusion Energy’s (INFUSE) program that facilitates collaboration between national laboratories and U.S. industries to speed the development on Earth of the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars. PPPL has collaborated in nine public-private ventures since INFUSE began in 2019, contributing its world class computing, experimental and engineering expertise to five private fusion developers in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom.