On January 30, 2003 the U.S. joined the negotiations for the construction and operation of a major international magnetic fusion project. Known as ITER (Latin for “the way”), the project’s mission is to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy, the power source of the sun and the stars.
In November 2003, the Department of Energy published Facilities for the Future of Science: A Twenty-Year Outlook, a landmark portfolio of prioritized new scientific facilities and upgrades of current facilities spanning the scientific disciplines to ensure that the U.S. retains its primacy in critical areas of science and technology. ITER was the top-ranked project in that roadmap.
Fusion is considered to be a key element in U.S. long-term energy plans because fusion offers the potential for abundant, safe and environmentally benign energy. ITER will allow scientists to explore the physics of a burning plasma at energy densities close to that of a commercial power plant, the critical next step in producing and delivering commercially available electricity from fusion to the grid.
Another key advantage of fusion energy over current methods of electricity generation is that it can produce hydrogen with no carbon emissions. Thus, ITER may contribute to a hydrogen-based economy of the future.
The Department of Energy has led the U.S. delegation to the ITER talks. The other six ITER parties are China, the European Union (EU), India, Japan, the Russian Federation, and South Korea. Countries representing more than half of the world's population are participating in ITER.
In June 2005, the ITER parties announced the ITER international fusion reactor will be located at the EU site in Cadarache, France.
The U.S. ITER Project Office, a partnership of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, is responsible for project management of U.S. activities to support construction of the international research facility. It is located at Oak Ridge so that the U.S. ITER program can take advantage of the project management experience developed by ORNL during the construction there of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS). The $1.4 billion SNS, a neutron scattering facility that will make the U.S. the leader in the next generation of materials research, is the largest civilian science project in the country and was completed on scheduled and on budget in 2006.
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