ITER: The Most Ambitious Nuclear Fusion Project in History

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]Nuclear fusion, the solution to humanity's energy instability, the key to space travel. Shout out for all mankinds. A boon to the electric bills everywhere. And it's only been right around the corner for about 75 years.

[00:00:14]It's easy to see why the technology is so hyped and why it would be such an incredible gamecher for well pretty much everything. Science, the economy, the environment, the list goes on. Not only is it a clean and sustainable power source with inert helium gas being the primary waste product, but it's incredibly efficient and would get lots of nice helium balloons. Nuclear fusion creates nearly 4 million times more energy per kilogram than fossil fuels, which is a lot. Yet, despite a deep understanding of the physics and decades upon decades of research and test reactors, nuclear fusion still doesn't play any role in our electrical grid.

[00:00:51]Finally, the global physics community has decided it will take the collaboration of multiple countries operating with a commensurate budget to achieve the technological breakthrough required. The international thermonuclear experimental reactor or because that's an incredible mouthful.

[00:01:07]It is currently constructing the world's largest nuclear fusion reactor in Sambul Le in southern France and I apologize French people. With lighter, scientists from around the world plan to really put nuclear fusion right around the corner.

[00:01:23]Well, 2035 at least. Energy of the future.

[00:01:28]While the past decades have proven nuclear fusion a tough hurdle to clear for us humans, it's mindn numbingly common all throughout the universe. It's the phenomenon that causes stars like the sun to produce energy. It is indirectly the source of the vast majority of energy we consume already.

[00:01:44]From fossil fuels which contains solar energy trapped by plants tens of millions of years ago to hydroelectric dams which tap into the water cycle which is driven by the sun's radiation.

[00:01:55]However, despite simplified headlines and catchphrases, the nuclear fusion that physicists hope to achieve in reactors like its is not quite the same as the one that's occurring inside stars. The sun's nuclear fusion is incredibly elegant in its simplicity.

[00:02:10]The nuclei of proteium, a hydrogen isotope containing a single proton in the nucleus and no neutrons, fused together to form dutyium, a hydrogen isotope containing one proton and one neutron. The catch here, if you notice, is that one of the protons must somehow turn into a neutron. Normally, two free protons would not fuse together because even in the sun, the electromagnetic force is powerful enough to tear them apart, even if they do collide. However, if the weak nuclear force causes one of these protons to undergo beta plus decay right at the moment they collide, the strong nuclear force can take over and overcome the electromagnetic force, thus keeping the nucleus together and forming dutyium. The beta plus decay simultaneously releases a posetron and neutrino. Now, since this part of the process essentially depends on random chance, it is wildly inefficient.

[00:03:02]Protons in the sun's core must wait an average of 9 billion years before they successfully find a partner to fuse with. Once that happens though, it sparks a rapid series of events called the PP PP chain. Really, thanks to the added neutron and power of the strong nuclear force, a newly formed duty nucleus needs all of 4 seconds to fuse with another free proton, thereby creating helium 3.

[00:03:28]This is a helium isotope with two protons and one neutron. And yes, the maths checks out. Things are not finished though. With an average weight time of 400 years, still pretty fast compared to the first step. Two helium 3 nuclei find each other to fuse into helium 4, a helium isotope with two protons and two neutrons. And yes, the maths does work, but if you're following along, you will realize that this leaves two protons unaccounted for. This time they're spit back out into the sun's plasma where they get to start the whole cycle over again, i.e. a 9 billionyear weight. In the case of our sun, at least right now, this helium 4 then just gets to chill and the constant internal chaos happening all around it. However, in around 5 billion years, the day will come when there's not enough hydrogen left to produce sufficient fusion to create the outward pressure to resist gravity. The sun's core will collapse and the increased compression and heat will cause the helium to begin fusing as well. And something called the triple alpha process, the sun will produce burillium and then carbon and finally oxygen. Now the sun does not have enough mass to continue from there. It will shed its outer layers to form a planetary nebula while leaving behind a glowing chunk of carbon and oxygen called a white dwarf. Larger stars though, those at least eight times heavier than our sun, so quite large, can keep on going. They could even fuse oxygen nuclei to create silicon and finally iron before exploding in a big supernova. The plasma soup of protons ramming into each other can only remain contained within the sun because of its massive size. At 150 gram per cubic centimeter, its core is more than 10 times denser than solid lead. And the resulting gravity keeps enough protons close enough together that nuclear fusion occurs, even if that initial step does take 9 billion years. Nuclear engineers don't have the luxury of 9 billion years or a mass 330,000 times that of Earth. As a result, they must use really powerful magnets to contain the plasma and use fuel that is already willing to fuse without the weak nuclear force. Specifically, a tokamac reactor like its uses dutyium and tritium, an even heavier hydrogen isotope consisting of one proton and two neutrons.

[00:05:45]Additionally, since they can't get the fuel as dense as the sun, they must make it even hotter to ensure that particles are moving fast enough to fuse together when they collide. This means 150 million Kelvin, which is 10 times hotter than the sun's core. When the setup fuses dutyium and tritium nuclei, it forms helium 4 just like the sun with the remainder being a single highly energized free neutron. The incredible energy potential of these processes can be seen in Einstein's simple equation E= MC² reflecting that the mass of matter can be turned into a huge amount of energy. Take a single kilogram of stellar fuel as it goes through the entire PP chain. First, we have four proteium nuclei, each with a mass of 1.0078U.

[00:06:30]That's the standardized unit for atomic mass for a total of 4.0313U.

[00:06:35]By the time we have a helium 4 atom, we only have about 4 U. We're missing about 0.03 or about.7% of the mass we started with.

[00:06:44]If we're talking about a single kilogram of fuel, that means we lost 7 g. That might not seem like a lot, but plug it into Einstein's equation. its mass times the speed of light, which is almost 300 billion m/s squared. The result is an absolutely mind-boggling 6.4 * 10 ^ of 14 jew of energy. That's roughly 177,000 megawatt hours, which is enough energy to power a city the size of Boulder, Colorado for over a month with 7 G.

[00:07:15]Despite having more efficient fuel, a tokamac like its does not produce quite as much bang for your buck. Running it through the same maths, you get only a measly 93,700 megawatt hours, enough to power Boulder for around 3 weeks. For comparison, a kilogram of natural gas burnt at a power plant produces just 0.009 megatt hours or 9 kwatt hours. That's about enough to do um three loads of laundry or perhaps roast a Thanksgiving turkey for 4 hours. And so you can probably see why fusion attracts so much attention.

[00:07:50]Just a joke.

[00:07:53]American astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer is generally considered the father of civil nuclear fusion research because he prompted the US government to convert Project Matterhorn from fusion weapons research to fusion reactor research, resulting in the creation of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

[00:08:08]What's not so wellknown is that Spitzer himself was actually inspired by Argentine scientist Ronald Richter. In March 1951, President of Argentina Juan Pon made the shocking announcement that RTOR had achieved the liberation of atomic energy. But rather than splitting uranium atoms as with nuclear fishision reactors, he had used the controlled nuclear fusion of hydrogen. Apparently, despite being a small and rural country at just 16 million people at the time, Argentina had poured millions into their top secret proctol, which saw Ronald Recctor build a 40ft tall concrete bunker on a remote island in Patagonia of the same name. After a far destroyed much of his equipment in his lab in Cordoba, Richtor was convinced spies were trying to sabotage him and he asked President Baron for the protected isolated location. However, Richtor ended up not even using the bunker. After claiming to see a microscopic crack on the exterior of the 4 m thick concrete, he declared it was useless and had it completely torn down.

[00:09:03]He then created a nuclear fusion reactor inside a secondary brick building on the island and it started churning out positive amounts of energy by February 1951. Or at least that's what he said.

[00:09:14]While the international community was stunned that Argentina could so quickly develop nuclear fusion before the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, this quickly faded and scientists began to review RTOR's data and noticed some uh pretty glaring problems. Richtor's claims of success relied on several readings such as Doppler widening, radiation readouts, and ultrasound detection. But other scientists pointed out that his data looked more like equipment malfunctions or misinterpretations. For example, engineer Mario Bangora, part of the investigating committee, pointed out that the clicks on RTOR's Geiger counters were not from neutrons and therefore nuclear radiation, but rather electromagnetic interference from the reactor's massive electrical sparks.

[00:09:57]Numerous scientists and officials asked Rtor to repeat his tests to prove his claims, but he refused. Instead, he held up on his island and rejected demands to publish papers or allow independent scientists to visit. Finally, without reproducing his results a single time, he ordered the reactor destroyed and the construction of another massive concrete bunker, this one underground. It was in the process of this bunker being dug that the government shut the whole thing down. While many see Ronald Richtor as a scam artist trying to swindle the Argentine government out of hundreds of millions of pesos, still more believe that he was just kind of out of his mind. He appeared to suffer from paranoia and often blamed spies and sabotage for failed experiments. on top of constantly misinterpreting data to fit his goals. 3 years after the project was shouted, a military coup overthrow President Juan Pon and the new government arrested Rich for fraud and squandering state funds. He was imprisoned for a short time but ultimately spent most of the rest of his life in Buenos Aries in a suburb before he ultimately died in 1991. Never once having admitted that he was wrong about his reactor. The ruins of the facilities on Qual Islands remain visible to this day and boat tours operate from nearby Baralo to give visitors a glimpse in case you're ever interested. While the roughly $525 million spent on Royal Richtor and Proctor didn't actually produce net positive energy or even nuclear fusion, it was not totally wasted because it ended up inspiring Lyman Spitzer. After the astrophysicist first learns of the alleged fusion reactor, he took several days off to go skiing and think about reactor's design, namely the idea of confining hot plasma within a magnetic field. And this concept has gone on to inspire the vast majority of fusion research and experimental reactors, including the one under construction at ITA. Plasma donuts.

[00:11:43]A nuclear fusion reactor must overcome something called the column barrier.

[00:11:48]This is the point at which two protons are close enough that the strong nuclear force takes over and they fuse together rather than being repelled apart by the electromagnetic force. The sun uses a major hack to cross this barrier.

[00:11:59]Quantum tunneling. This is like a physics magic trick. Remember, protons are subatomic particles, but they're also waves, meaning that their position is probabilistic. If a wave function extends over a barrier, there's a nonzero chance that the particle will appear on the other side. To put it in layman's terms, some protons in the sun score just randomly teleport across the column barrier to hug up against a fellow proton. Still, the two protons would exist as a single atomic nucleus for a mere fraction of a second if it weren't for the beta decay that we touched on earlier. If one of the protons decays into a neutron at exactly the right moment, it won't push away its partner. Do you know the chance of these phenomena happening at just the right moment to allow for nuclear fusion was so low that it would take 9 billion years to happen? You probably do mentioned it a few times. The sun is a giant ball of nuclear fusion because it has just an insane number of protons. Uh specifically, if you're interested, it's 1.2 * 10 ^ of 57. That's a 12 followed by uh 56 zeros. That's a lot of protons and a lot of zeros. We don't have that many protons, nor do we have billions of years. Instead, physicists must overcome the column barrier by heating the protons up so much that they are moving so fast that they simply plow through it without needing quantum tunneling. Yet, how do you physically hold plasma that is 150 million°?

[00:13:22]Any physical material would instantly vaporize? This is what Lyman Spitzer found so compelling about Ronald Richtor's otherwise failed experiment.

[00:13:30]The idea of using magnets to confine the plasma. Still, it's not as easy as it sounds. First of all, you can't just create a straight tube of magnets.

[00:13:39]Remember, the particles in the plasma are moving insanely fast, nearly 1,360 km/s, or roughly 3 million mph. So, basically, they'd very quickly reach the end of the tube and slam into the wall, vaporizing it. The solution is to put the magnets in a loop like a giant metal donut. Now, they just go around and around in a circle. But this leaves you with a new problem. The magnets on the inside of the loop, inside the donor hole, if you will, are more closely packed together than those on the outside. This causes the magnetic field to be stronger on the inside of the loop, causing drift. The positively charged protons of the plasma and the negatively charged electrons get pushed in opposite directions and the highly energized particles slam into the walls again vaporized. Lyman Spitzer solved this problem by inventing the stellarator in 1951. It looked like a figure of eight. This simple geometric change meant that the particles traveling on the inside of the tube at one point find themselves on the outside at the complimentary point in the figure of eight. Unfortunately, this design proved too difficult to build at large enough scales. Other physicists have attempted to adapt the stellarator by keeping a simple donut shape using highly warped 3D magnets to twist the plasma as it travels through the tube.

[00:14:55]However, these magnets are an engineering nightmare and require microscopic precision. Instead, another design has come to dominate nuclear fusion research, the talkback.

[00:15:06]Originating with a Russian acronym for tooidor chamber with magnetic coils.

[00:15:10]It's a Soviet invention credited to Nobel Prize winners Andre Sakarov and Igor Tam. Ironically, the two physicists had fully developed their plan for the Tokamac with magnetic confinement and they'd got it into the hands of the Soviet top brass, namely Leventry Barrier, who oversaw the USSR's nuclear research program before the project Hyold debacle. But Barrier was seemingly uninterested in the idea because he never got back to them. That is until Ronald Rear made headlines. In April of that year, Dmitri Efimov of the USSR Scientific Research Institute of Electropysical Apparatus, another massive mouthful, stormed into the office of Igor Kcherov, the director of the Soviet Union's atomic bomb project, and demanded to know why they'd been beaten to nuclear fusion by Argentina. Ktov contacted Barrier, and on May the 5th, Joseph Stalin himself signed the Tokamac proposal. The TOK keeps the simple doughut shape but solves the magnet problem by driving a powerful electrical current through the plasma itself. This creates a circular magnetic field called the poloidal field that causes the plasma to twist into a helix. This way the particles pass evenly through the different magnetic fields and aren't thrown into the walls of the reactor. The first working called T1 was finally created in 1958 under the leadership of Lev Artsovich. That same year, the USSR released much of their fusion research at the second atoms for peace meeting in Geneva, introducing Western physicists to the idea.

[00:16:37]Ironically though, the design was mostly ignored as the Soviets had yet to achieve any notable results. The celerator was the star, pun intended, of the show. The Tokamac remains primarily a Soviet project. Then in 1968 at an international atomic energy conference in Novas Bisque, Artsumovich announced that their T3 Tokarmac had achieved plasma temperatures of 10 million Kelvin and kept it confined for over 10 milliseconds. That might not seem like that much, but it was leaps and bounds ahead of anything else Western stellarator or alternative design had achieved. Naturally, scientists in the US and Western Europe were skeptical, just as they'd been of Richtor's claims.

[00:17:16]Unlike RTOR though, Arts Simovich had no quans standing behind his results and invited a team of five scientists from the Cullum Laboratory in the UK to visit the USSR and verify his team's work. In 1969, the British envoy nicknamed the Cullum 5 spent months in Moscow confirming that the Soviet claims were indeed true. Nuclear fusion research was changed forever. Everyone dropped the stellarator and rushed to the tokamac which continues to dominate the industry's funding and focus to this day. For instance, in the private sector, Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Massachusetts currently leads funding with $3 billion.

[00:17:55]They are using the Docamac design. Yet, this is peanuts compared to its whopping $20 billion construction budget. And what design did this mega project go with? Yeah, they they won't be the talker back. Of course they did. Cold War hot plasma.

[00:18:14]So with an ignition date of 2035, it's incredible to think that Ida's inception dates to before I was born, right amid the tension of the Cold War. Despite being in an arms race with the threat of World War II constantly looming over them, the United States and Soviet Union managed to put their differences aside to meet in Geneva at the Superpower Summit in 1985. It was the first meeting between US President Ronald Reagan and newly appointed Soviet General Secretary Mikall Gorbachev. The two leaders forward about military programs and nuclear weapons, but they found common ground on the subject of nuclear fusion in large part thanks to Gorbachev's scientific adviser Evan Velikov, who insisted to his boss that an international collaborative effort was the only way to achieve it. In their joint final statement, the world's most powerful men formally advocated for the widest practical development of international cooperation in nuclear fusion for the benefit of all mankind.

[00:19:06]More formal plans were developed in 1986 at the Rekavic Summit where the quadripartite initiative committee was formed consisting of the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan and the European atomic energy community or Euroat which at the time represented 12 countries including France, West Germany and the UK. In 1987, the quadripartite initiative committee met at the International Atomic Energy Agency or IAA headquarters in Vienna where they hammered out the diplomatic details and organizational structure. They also decided on the name the international thermonuclear experimental reactor though they immediately decided that this was a mouthful and decided to call it ITA which also means the way in Latin. Finally in 1988 the actual scientific work began. A team of around 50 physicists and engineers from the four partners met at the Maxplank Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany, then West Germany. By 1990, they successfully submitted their first conceptual design for the test reactor, proving something arguably more important than the fundamental physics of nuclear fusion. They showed that despite the intense hostility between some of the participating nations, their scientists could come together to collaborate towards a common goal for all of humanity.

[00:20:19]The first hiccups through 1992, IT was in its infancy. The scientists and diplomats involved were optimistic, putting big plans on paper and playing around with numbers. But then they had to take those plans into the real world where multi-billion dollar budgets, unpredictable domestic politics, and tense international relations were waiting. The first major hiccup came in 1998. After sixish years creating the finalized design of the reactor, the engineering design activities team revealed the price tag.

[00:20:49]$10 billion. US Congress did the legislative equivalent of a spit take and pulled the United States out of the project completely in 1999. Without US funding, the plausible budget for ITA was severely constrained. The three remaining members, Russia having taken over from the Soviet Union, Japan and Euro by then representing the EU and its 15 member states and Canada, oddly enough, took 2 years to come up with a much more scaledback design known as ITA feat for fusion energy advanced TOKAC.

[00:21:20]While it basically cut costs in half, the team believed it maintained the core scientific goals. This is essentially the plan that's being followed by ITA today. Another major problem arose when choosing the site. Although it may not dominate the pages of high school history books, this actually evolved into one of the most dramatic diplomatic deadlocks in modern scientific history and became a major geopolitical symbol of the era. Initially, there were four bids. Clarington in Canada near Toronto, Vanos in Spain near Barcelona, the Katarash campus in San Paul's deceas France near Mail and Ricasho in Japan.

[00:21:54]All of these locations had their advantages. Canada's proposed site in Clarington was right next to the Darlington tritium removal facility.

[00:22:02]Because Canada's domestic nuclear reactors, Candi reactors use heavy water, they produce tritium as a byproduct. Tritium is incredibly rare and radioactive, but it would need a steady supply of it, making Clarington ideal. Similarly, Spain's side near Barcelona was near an existing nuclear plant. More importantly, it was next to a huge deep water port that would have been a boon for the project's logistics.

[00:22:24]France's proposed location had a huge advantage in that kadarash o was already home to the to supraomeac now called west. This meant sour led duros already had a nuclear culture and precisely the educated specialized workforce that it would need. Lastly, rkasho in Japan benefited from coastal access into ports like vanos and the city already had a nuclear reprocessing plant. Plus, the Japanese government committed to building a world-class international village for the ITA scientists. In 2003, the participants agreed to the cost sharing formula for the ITA site. The host country was to be slapped with a massive bill, 48% of the total construction costs with the remaining 52% to be split among the other partners. Based on the budget at the time that meant around $5.5 billion, Canada dropped out of the race.

[00:23:12]Meanwhile, Euroton decided they should unify behind a single candidate. Spain agreed to drop out on the condition the agency responsible for managing Europe's financial and procurement contribution to ITA now called Fusion for energy or F4E would be located in Barcelona and that a Spaniard would be favored for the role of first director. The same year the United States under President George W. Bush rejoined and China and South Korea signed on as well. The two remaining site bids split the members.

[00:23:38]Euro, Russia and China backed France while the US and South Korea backed Japan. three versus three. Now, this deadlock was further exacerbated by the United States's invasion of Iraq in 2003. Japan supported the invasion while France did not. Historians generally agree the US stood so steadfastly behind Japan's candidacy, at least in part as political retaliation against France.

[00:24:02]The participating nations could not reach an agreement for nearly two years, and there were fears that they would have to split into two competing projects. Finally, in 2005, European and Japanese diplomats negotiated the broader approach agreement. Japan agreed to drop out and let it be built in France in exchange for massive concessions. First, Japan's required contribution was set at just 10% of total construction costs, but they would receive 20% of the high-tech manufacturing contracts. Furthermore, they were guaranteed 20% of the research staff positions. And last but not least, the EU would heavily subsidize a parallel fusion research hub in Japan, including upgrading an existing Japanese called the JT60SA and building the international fusion materials radiation facility to test materials for future commercial reactors. With these major hurdles overcome, the mega project seven participants India joined in late 2005, met at the Eli Palace in Paris in 2006 and officially signed the IT agreement.

[00:25:01]Breaking ground.

[00:25:03]Bulldozers started clearing the site for it in 2007. Measuring some 42 hectares or well over 100,000 acres, they evacuated millions of cubic meters of rock to create a massive flat platform.

[00:25:16]Perhaps the most impressive part of the facility's construction was the anti-seismic measures. Since Idrader is a nuclear site, it has to be able to survive earthquakes. This meant digging out a pit big enough to fit the main tok complex building plus reinforced concrete retaining walls. So it was roughly 130 m long by 90 m wide or 425x 395 ft. At the bottom of the pit, the builders installed 493 seismic isolation columns. Each of these is topped with a specialized rubber and steel bearing.

[00:25:45]The entire Tokat complex, which weighs some 400,000 tons, more than the Empire State Building, by the way, rests on these bearings. This essentially isolates it from the earth below, keeping it stable if the earth starts to move around. While the construction of the facility was relatively smooth sailing, the construction of the actual reactor proved a tough feat. Instead of having member states simply write checks to someone in France, the ITRE agreement sees some 90% of the project funded by inkind contributions. In other words, the United States doesn't give it a million dollars to buy a specialized microchip, for example. Instead, the United States manufactures the microchip and then sends it to Katarash. This creates an obvious problem. How do all of these parts work together? Manager compatibility and tolerances across vastly different cultures and languages, not to mention time zones, is tough to say the least. By 2013, ITA was in serious trouble. An independent management assessment led by William Media drew up a scathing report pointing to a lack of centralized leadership, poor decision-making structures, and most importantly, friction and blame between ITA and the member states, domestic agencies, and companies building the parts. Moreover, costs were spiraling with internal projections approaching the $20 billion mark. The participating countries were getting frustrated, especially the United States, and Congress was threatening to pull out again. Luckily, Bernard BGO, the former head of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, came to the rescue in 2015.

[00:27:11]Using sweeping executive powers, he completely overhauled the management structure, better integrated the central team with the relevant member state agencies, and established a new baseline schedule. His management is widely credited with saving item from collapse.

[00:27:24]With a new and improved management philosophy, the incind funding system actually started to channel some pretty cool stuff. For example, India produced the Cryostat at 30 by 30 m or 100 by 100 ft. It is the largest high vacuum vessel ever built and it wraps around the entire reactor to keep the magnets super cooled. Similarly, Europe and Japan have manufactured the tooidal field coils, massive D-shaped superconducting magnets that weigh over 300 tons each and must be cooled to - 269 C or -450 Fahrenheit.

[00:27:56]Colder than the dark side of the moon.

[00:27:58]Fun fact. Meanwhile, General Atomics in California is building the central solenoid or CS. This is the main induction coil of the tokamax that drives the electrical current in the plasma, serving as the heartbeat of the reactor. Using a whopping 43 km or 27 mi of neobium tin superconducting cable, it stands 5 stories tall and weighs 1,000 tons. More importantly, it produces up to 15 million amp of electrical current.

[00:28:21]So much that its magnetic field could lift an aircraft carrier out of the water. Holy, five of six modules have already been installed at the ITA facility. Speaking of installation though, this is yet another obstacle to it success. All of those parts may be super cool. Some of them literally so, but they all have to get to the south of France somehow. Even after shipping to the Mediterranean port of Fossumeare, the parts must travel over 100 km or 60 mi to Katarash. To facilitate this, France spent over €100 million to create the iterinary. This included modifying existing roads, reinforcing bridges, and building bypasses around towns. They then contracted the DHA Logistics Company to operate self-propelled modular transporters or SPMTs to carry the insanely heavy parts to the build site. These are engineering marvels in their own right. Entirely remote controlled heavy holage vehicles which bolt together to create customsized platforms capable of holding massive industrial equipment. Starting in 2015, these massive SPMTs began crawling through the French countryside like caterpillars carrying nuclear reactor components weighing up to 800 tons. By 2019, the facility itself was completed and giant overhead assembly cranes were installed for putting together the TOKAC.

[00:29:38]The new baseline assembly of the talkback reactor pressed forward throughout the early 2020s with deliveries of components arriving regularly even despite the coid9 pandemic. Then in late 2022 and 2023, engineers discovered major defects in the construction. First, there were dimensional nonconformities in the welded bevel joints of the vacuum vessel sectors. Basically, the giant metal slices of the reactor didn't fit together because the edges didn't match.

[00:30:05]With an external diameter of over 19 m or 62 ft and weighing over 5,000 tons, the vacuum vessel, the core chamber of the TOMAC, is too massive to be made in one piece. Instead, it was manufactured in nine sectors in different factories around the world and shipped to France.

[00:30:19]When they all got there, engineers found out that they did line up correctly.

[00:30:24]Next, they found stress corrosion cracking in the cooling pipes of the thermal shields. It uses silverplated thermal shields to protect the magnets, which must be kept incredibly cold, from the plasma, which must be kept incredibly hot. The shields are covered with a network of pipes constantly pumping super cold helium gas across them. Stress from construction and chemicals from the manufacturing process apparently caused microscopic cracks in these pipes which could cause the thermal shields to fail, destroying magnets. Assembly of the tokamag had to be paused while engineers figured out how to fix these components which were mostly manufactured in other countries.

[00:30:54]As a result, ISA totally canled their plans for burst plasma set for 2025. In reality, this was going to be more of a PR stunt anyway. The reactor would still have been incomplete, but a brief low energy flash of hydrogen plasma would prove the magnets worked and the vacuum vessel wouldn't fall apart. In other words, brief concept, though with not really any scientific value. To make up for the lost time, IT has now decided to skip this step entirely and simply look forward to the start of research operations or SRO in 2034 followed by actual dutarium deterium fusion operations in 2035 that includes a complete TOKCAC with all components inside. Over time, the reactor will slowly transition to a full dutyium tritium fusion currently slated for 2039. Additionally, along with this new baseline time frame, ITA decided to upgrade the material of taramax in a wall that must face the violent superheated plasma. Originally, engineers plan to line the reactor with burillium, which is lighter and easier to work with than alternatives. However, it erodess quickly under the extreme conditions of plasma confinement, so they knew they'd have to tear it out and replace it at some point. Now, they'll line the inner wall with tungsten from the get-go. With the highest melting point of any metal, tungsten is inevitably what actual commercial fusion power plants will have to use. It's heavier and harder to work with than brilliant, but focusing on it will save time and money in the long run. When finished, the itamac will hold a plasma volume of over 830 cubic meters or nearly 30,000 cubic feet. The largest ever built and 8 times bigger than the largest tokamax currently operating. It will weigh 23,000 tons, equivalent to three Eiffel Towers, and contain 60 meons of force, twice the thrust of the space shuttle at takeoff. Despite the huge plasma volume, the vacuum chamber will only be filled with roughly a gram of gas. Nevertheless, with a confinement time of just 3.4 to 3.5 seconds, ITA hopes to produce 500 megawatts of thermal power with dutium critium fusion, enough to power up to half a million homes.

[00:32:52]The catch.

[00:32:54]So, the IT reactor will produce 500 megawatts of thermal power while only requiring 50 megawatt of thermal input to heat the plasma. In engineering terms, this gives it a Q factor of 10 since it produces 10 times more power than it consumes. However, what's widely misunderstood is that this is merely the scientific Q factor. It's only counting the heat that goes into the plasma and that comes out of it. It's not considering the massive amounts of electricity required to cool the magnets, run the vacuum pumps, or just keep the lights on in such a massive facility. In reality, ITA requires about 300 megawatt to operate its reactor.

[00:33:30]Moreover, commercial power plants relying on thermal power to spin steam turbines rarely surpass 35% efficiency.

[00:33:37]In other words, that'd only generate about 175 megawatt from its 500 megawatt generated. If you do the maths, you'll see that for actual electricity production, iter is a net loss. And this is a major point of confusion. The biggest catch of this whole mega project. Iter is entirely experimental.

[00:33:56]It is not meant to generate electricity with the grid at all. There are no steam turbines or anywhere to put them even if they wanted to. Instead, ITA is serving as a scientific and engineering proving ground for various concepts that will be necessary for commercial power plants in the future. Iotopes to develop tritium self-sufficiency. Since the hydrogen isotope is so rare and expensive, engineers want to install test blanket modules or TBMs, lithium lined wall segments. When a neutron flies out of the plasma and runs into one of the blankets lithium atoms, the lithium nucleus shatters into tritium and helium, thus breeding tritium right in the reactor itself. Also, it wants to stabilize their plasma to the point the fusion reaction can sustain its own heat. That would cut down on outside power requirements considerably. Last, ITA will pioneer the advanced robots that will be necessary to maintain the tokamax since humans won't be able to do much inside the highly radioactive chamber. Don't worry though, it's not all just theory. It has a practical follow-up plan to generate usable electricity called demo or demonstration power plant. Rather than a single reactor, each member nation participating in iter will take the lessons learned in Katarash back home to build their own demo prototypes. For example, Europe's EU demo, South Korea's K demo, and Japan's JA demo are already being designed. Simply put, these demo prototypes will hook up a fusion reactor like its to steam turbines to generate electricity for the grid. To do this, they must have steadystate continuous plasma operation rather than just pulses like it. They must have a closed fuel cycle and breed 100% of their tritium fuel without needing any shipped in.

[00:35:29]Most importantly though, the demos must have an engineering queue over one. They must produce more power in the form of grid captured electricity than they consume to run. And that's a tall order since DEO relies entirely on the data and engineering insights from iter. Most nations don't plan to finalize their designs until the late 2030s. That means construction won't start until the 2040s and actual energy production isn't foreseen until the 2050s at the earliest. So I is the largest international scientific collaboration in history. But it's not going to generate a single watt of power to charge a phone. That does not however mean that it isn't an incredible medical project requiring billions of dollars cutting edge scientific expertise and most importantly of all diplomatic and political cooperation on levels rarely seen. Its contributions to fusion science already have been and will continue to be immense. So much so that if all goes according to plan, the research the ITA team conducts may finally make fusion power a reality for humanity a century after the global race began. Thank you for watching.