A dream for almost three decades, construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is finally getting under way in southern France. This huge multinational experiment, which is a joint effort of China, the EU, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US, seeks to create a deuterium-tritium plasma that can release 10 times more power than it consumes. The aim is to show that fusion can potentially be a sustainable source of energy here on Earth.
But with costs for ITER climbing to €13bn – and rising – is it money well spent? In this exclusive video interview with physicsworld.com, Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, who was chairman of ITER’s council from 2007 to 2009, defends the project, saying that “we cannot afford not to develop fusion”. In his view, fusion – along with solar power and fission reactors – is the only feasible way to fill the gap between the energy available from conventional fossil fuels and the ever-rising total global energy demand. Llewellyn Smith, who was director-general of the CERN particle-physics lab in the mid-1990s, also shines a light on the tensions involved in ITER, bringing together as it does many different partners together in a large, complex and technically ambitious experiment.
