ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) Council approved the Overall Project Schedule (OPS) and the Overall Project Cost (OPC) in an extraordinary meeting in late July. This means that the world's largest experimental nuclear fusion project, which is being undertaken by the Eropean Union, the United States, Japan, Russia, China, South Korea and India, will receive full thrust for the construction of the reactor in Cadarache in southern France. If everything goes well, a process similar to the nuclear forces that power the sun and the stars will be enacted in the reactor. The project participants' ultimate goal is to harness nuclear fusion to produce electricity.
The origin of the ITER project dates back to a 1985 summit of the U.S. and Soviet leaders. The original participants included the U.S., the Soviet Union, the EU and Japan. A detailed conceptual and engineering design was accepted in 2001. It was decided in 2005 that the ITER reactor would be built in France. In 2007, the ITER Agreement went into effect. Japan provides 20 percent of the research staff and a Japanese scientist serves as director general of the ITER Organization. In Latin, "iter" means "way" or "journey."
ITER will use deuterium and tritium as fuels. When they fuse, the two nuclei join and produce a helium nucleus, a high-energy neutron and a much larger amount of energy than was needed to fuse the two nuclei. For the fusion to occur, deuterium and tritium must be turned into plasma — an electrically neutral, ionized gas composed of electrons and positive ions — and the plasma must be confined for a duration of time. To create plasma, a temperature of more than 100 million C is needed. The key to success is to develop technology that can confine and control plasma in such a high temperature.