POWER June 2020 - 40

NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY
all of which will share in the technology
ITER develops.
ITER is not the only undertaking generating
excitement in the fusion community.
At least a dozen private start-up
companies have begun investigating
alternative approaches to fusion energy
over the past decade (see sidebar).
Some of them are working on slightly
different magnetic confinement methods,
others are pursuing truly innovative-if
high-risk-methods that could
produce dramatic
breakthroughs.
5. This cutaway schematic of the ITER facility shows the tokamak in the center with a simulation
of the fusion plasma inside the tokamak. The entire device is about five stories tall.
Courtesy: ITER
was selected as the site of the facility.
However, there were considerable challenges
in getting such a large project
with so many members off the ground.
Construction proceeded somewhat fitfully
for several years and fell badly behind
schedule. The delays and budget
overruns drew concern from several
quarters, particularly the appropriations
committees in Congress.
In 2015, Bernard Bigot, the former
director of the French Atomic Energy
Commission, was brought in to assume
oversight of the project. Bigot was successful
in establishing a professional
project culture, and construction is now
two-thirds complete. Initial ITER operations
are scheduled for 2025, with DT
operation set for 2035 (Figure 4).
ITER will have many capabilities that
go well beyond current tokamaks. It will
be the first device that can generate
a burning plasma and explore the fundamentals
of how a tokamak contains
the fusion reaction and the process of
self-heating. Using DT fusion, ITER will
produce 500 MW of fusion power at a
Q value of 10-smashing the current
world record of 16 MW at a Q value of
0.67, which was achieved on JET in 1997.
ITER will be by far the largest and
highest magnetic field tokamak in the
world, and it will be powered by a central
solenoid that will be the most powerful
pulsed superconducting magnet ever
constructed (Figure 5). Fabricated from
36 km of superconducting cable, this
1,000-ton magnet will drive 15 million
amperes of current through the plasma,
far more than anything that has been
possible before. The U.S. is supplying
the ITER central solenoid, which is currently
being manufactured by General
Atomics. The first of six modules that
40
will comprise the central solenoid has
finished testing and is being shipped to
France this summer.
In addition, ITER will serve as a test
bed for a number of critical fusion technologies,
including tritium breeding,
plasma control, advanced diagnostics,
and disruption mitigation. Though it will
not operate as a power plant, ITER will
test safety features that future fusion
power plants will require.
As a first-of-a-kind research and demonstration
project, ITER is naturally
quite expensive. Because most of the
contributions are in-kind components
produced in the member nations under
different public financing approaches,
an exact total of ITER's costs is impossible
to produce. However, a rough
estimate generated by the ITER organization
in 2016 was around $20 billion
through start of DT operations in 2035.
As large as that figure may seem, it is
spread across a coalition of 35 nations,
All
of them are looking for paths to fusion
that are simpler and less expensive
than ITER.
Fusion Development After ITER
What will come after ITER? The details
are still to be determined, but a number
of targets are in sight. If all goes well,
the technology from ITER should enable
electricity generation from fusion,
and member nations are not waiting
until the late 2030s to begin planning.
Several follow-on devices that will be
even higher performance than ITER are
in development.
The ITER coalition has referred to
this next step as the DEMO phase, and
several conceptual designs for DEMO
devices are in development in the EU,
U.S., Korea, and China. DEMO-stage
devices are expected to be simpler and
less expensive than ITER, because they
will be designed for power generation
rather than research, as well as being
" always on " devices that operate in
steady state rather than exploring different
fusion regimes. Of these, China's
may be the closest to operation.
Known as the China Fusion Engineering
Test Reactor (CFETR, Figure 7), this
7. The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor, shown in this artist's impression, could begin
operations in the late 2030s. Courtesy: China Institute of Plasma Physics
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