Draft2:ITER

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A view from the center of the tokamak complex at the ITER site

ITER on Wikipedia

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Building the Heart of ITER

ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and also Latin for "the way") is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject, which will be the world's largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment. It is an experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor that is being built next to the Cadarache facility in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, south of France.

The ITER project aims to make the long-awaited transition from experimental studies of plasma physics to full-scale electricity-producing fusion power stations. The ITER fusion reactor has been designed to produce 500 megawatts of output power for several seconds while needing 50 megawatts to operate. Thereby the machine aims to demonstrate the principle of producing more energy from the fusion process than is used to initiate it, something that has not yet been achieved in any fusion reactor.

US ITER Project Office (US ITER or USITER) is an Office of Science project managed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Partner labs are Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Savannah River National Laboratory.

ITER project (2016 Presidential transition) and ITER Project (2020 Presidential transition) were created to describe the status of the project for the incoming administrations.

Official Site - ITER.org

Topic at DOE

The DOE is lead U.S. Government agency responsible for delivery of U.S. commitments to ITER construction. These commitment include roughly 80% in-kind components (with associated R&D and other costs) as well as 20% monetary contributions to the ITER Organization (IO) to cover common expenses such as personnel, assembly, commissioning, and agreed site infrastructure costs. Once operations commence, the DOE will contribute 13% of the monetary costs of running the ITER research facility in addition to costs of supporting U.S. researchers who are selected to perform experiments at the site.

DOE senior management has leadership responsibility for the project. The Director of FES has day-to-day responsibility for the management of the USITER Project, and provides input to strategic decision making at higher levels of the Department.

Organization

The Project is managed at the international level by the IO, which is overseen by the ITER Council (IC). The DOE Head of Delegation to the IC has been the DOE Under Secretary for Science and Energy since 2013 (previously, the Office of Science Director). DOE and State Department officials make up rest of the US ITER council Delegation.

USITER is responsible for delivery of a number of components. Over the past year or so, USITER has delivered drain tanks, part of the tokamak cooling water system, and has designed and is well underway in fabrication of central solenoid magnets – the first of six is in fabrication. USITER has also designed and shipped the bulk of the steady state electrical network, which will supply power for site operations.

Funding

The project is funded and run by seven member entities—the European Union, India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. The EU, as host party for the ITER complex, is contributing about 45 percent of the cost, with the other six parties contributing approximately 9 percent each.

Construction

Construction of the ITER Tokamak complex started in 2013 and the building costs are now over US$14 billion as of June 2015, some 3 times the original figure. The facility is expected to finish its construction phase in 2019 and will start commissioning the reactor that same year and initiate plasma experiments in 2020 with full deuterium–tritium fusion experiments starting in 2027. If ITER becomes operational, it will become the largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment in use, surpassing the Joint European Torus. The first commercial demonstration fusion power station, named DEMO, is proposed to follow on from the ITER project.

Background

At the November 1985 Geneva Summit, a Reagan-Gorbachev initiative led to the ITER Conceptual Design Activities (CDA) which began in April 1988 and were successfully completed in December 1990 and carried out jointly by the U.S., the European Union, Japan, and the USSR under IAEA auspices. On July 21, 1992, the European Union (EU), Japan, the Russian Federation and the U.S. signed a 6-year ITER Engineering Design Activities (EDA) Agreement. The U.S. completed its responsibilities under the EDA and did not extend our participation in 1998, effectively withdrawing from ITER.

On January 30, 2003, President Bush announced that the U.S. would join the ongoing ITER negotiations. From that time until the signing of the ITER Joint Implementation Agreement (Agreement) in November of 2006, the negotiators resolved a number of critical issues, including siting of the ITER project in France; management and financial responsibilities and allocation of material (in-kind) contributions; and the creation and staffing of an ITER Organization to manage ITER's construction and operations. The Agreement was signed in November 2006 and went into force on October 24, 2007. The Agreement was ratified as a treaty by the other partners after signature. The U.S. ratified it as a Congressional-Executive Agreement prior to signing under the authority provided by the Energy Policy Act (EPAct) of 2005.

Related

• European Atomic Energy Community
• Nuclear technology of fusion reactors implementing agreement
• Alcator C-Mod
• Doublet III-D Tokamak
• International Organizations with DOE Representation for the U.S. Government
• Heavy Ion Fusion Power
• Budget highlights (2016 Presidential transition)
• Fusion power
• Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) - operated at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) from 1982 to 1997. TFTR set a number of world records, including a plasma temperature of 510 million degrees centigrade -- the highest ever produced in a laboratory, and well beyond the 100 million degrees required for commercial fusion.

2016 Presidential transition

• Critical events (2016 Presidential transition)
• Issue papers (2016 Presidential transition)
• ITER project (2016 Presidential transition)
• Upcoming critical decisions and events (2016 Presidential transition)
• Laboratories (2016 Presidential transition)

External links

• Official site