ITER and the Promise of Fusion Energy

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What is ITER? ITER is a large international fusion experiment aimed at demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy. ITER (Latin for “the way”) will play a critical role advancing the worldwide availability of energy from fusion — the power source of the sun and the stars. To produce practical amounts of fusion power on earth, heavy forms of hydrogen are joined together at high temperature with an accompanying production of heat energy. The fuel must be held at a temperature of over 100 million degrees Celsius. At these high temperatures, the electrons are detached from the nuclei of the atoms, in a state of matter called plasma. In magnetic fusion energy, such as will be studied in ITER, magnetic fields are used to confine the high-temperature plasma with a density typically one millionth that of air at sea level. ITER Pamphlet

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