Commercial reactors modelled on ITER could generate power
with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste.
Keywords
International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER);
Science;
Machines;
Fusion;
Thermonuclear Energy;
Stefano Chiocchio;
The Sun
Years from now—maybe in a decade, maybe sooner—if all goes according to plan,
the most complex machine ever built will be switched on in an Alpine forest
in the South of France.
The machine, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor,
or ITER, will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons—
more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower. At its core, densely packed
igh-precision equipment will encase a cavernous vacuum chamber,
in which a super-hot cloud of heavy hydrogen will rotate faster than the speed of sound,
twisting like a strand of DNA as it circulates. The cloud will be scorched by electric current
(a surge so forceful that it will make lightning seem like a tiny arc of static electricity),
and bombarded by concentrated waves of radiation. Beams of uncharged particles—
the energy in them so great it could vaporize a car in seconds—will pour into the chamber,
adding tremendous heat. In this way, the circulating hydrogen will become ionized,
and achieve temperatures exceeding two hundred million degrees Celsius—
more than ten times as hot as the sun at its blazing core.
No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter. Like the sun, the cloud will go nuclear.
The zooming hydrogen atoms, in a state of extreme kinetic excitement,
will slam into one another, fusing to form a new element—helium—
and with each atomic coupling explosive energy will be released:
intense heat, gamma rays, X rays, a torrential flux of fast-moving neutrons
propelled in every direction.
There isn’t a physical substance that could contain such a thing.
Metals, plastics, ceramics, concrete, even pure diamond
—all would be obliterated on contact, and so the machine
will hold the superheated cloud in a “magnetic bottle,”
using the largest system of superconducting magnets in the world.
Just feet from the reactor’s core, the magnets will be
cooled to two hundred and sixty-nine degrees below zero,
nearly the temperature of deep space.
Caught in the grip of their titanic forces, the artificial earthbound sun
will be suspended, under tremendous pressure, in the pristine nothingness
of ITER’s vacuum interior.
For the machine’s creators, this process—sparking and controlling
a self-sustaining synthetic star—will be the culmination of decades of preparation,
billions of dollars’ worth of investment, and immeasurable ingenuity, misdirection,
recalibration, infighting, heartache, and ridicule. Few engineering feats can compare,
in scale, in technical complexity, in ambition or hubris. Even the ITER organization,
a makeshift scientific United Nations, assembled eight years ago to construct the machine,
is unprecedented. Thirty-five countries, representing more than half the world’s population,
are invested in the project, which is so complex to finance that it requires its own currency:
the ITER Unit of Account.
No one knows ITER’s true cost, which may be incalculable,
but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure
rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes ITER
the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth.
But if it is truly possible to bottle up a star, and to do so economically,
the technology could solve the world’s energy problems
for the next thirty million years, and help save the planet
from environmental catastrophe.
Hydrogen, a primordial element, is the most abundant atom in the universe,
a potential fuel that poses little risk of scarcity. Eventually, physicists hope,
commercial reactors modelled on ITER will be built, too—generating terawatts
of power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste.
The reactor would run on no more than seawater and lithium.
It would never melt down. It would realize a yearning,
as old as the story of Prometheus, to bring the light of the heavens to Earth,
and bend it to humanity’s will. ITER, in Latin, means “the way.”
