For seven years, Bernard Bigot oversaw the construction of a building so ambitious and challenging, and of such significance to humanity, he sometimes thought of it as a cathedral.
All of this in service of an audacious goal and a half-century old dream: To generate energy by harnessing nuclear fusion, the power source of the stars. Fusion, if it can ever be tamed, promises abundant power without smokestack fumes or planet-baking carbon emissions, without reactor meltdowns or long-lived radioactive waste—power on demand 24/7, with seawater as the ultimate source of fuel.
Harnessing nuclear fusion is among the hardest things humankind has ever attempted, and the technology’s elusiveness has long made it the butt of a joke: for more than half a century, fusion energy has always been “30 years away.” But that bitter joke might finally be wearing thin. A fusion plant would be fundamentally different from today’s nuclear power plants. They rely on nuclear fission, which releases energy when large, heavy atoms—such as uranium—break apart due to radioactive decay.
Achieving these conditions—let alone maintaining them—has been a decades-long quest. For years fusion experiments set one-off records for plasma temperatures, plasma densities, or confinement durations, but not all at once. This bonfire has taken longer than expected to ignite. Since the 1950s, researchers have built a series of bigger and more powerful experimental fusion reactors, many based on the tokamak, which was originally developed by the Soviet Union. A 1985 summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev opened the diplomatic door, and the U.S. and U.S.S.R. agreed to collaborate on building a tokamak large enough to achieve scientific breakeven.
Maybe you could convince leaders to build more nuclear fission plants in the mean time. 👍🏾
Chernobyl v2
Sad that even suggests that Fusion - or fission 'could pave the way for the future' They're both exothermic - heat producing. We need mesothermic or endothermic processes (solar PV, Wind, Tides, rivers, waves) as energy sources. Shame on .
titanic.
gadrilling Plasmabit Geothermal. This is the way.
We already have nuclear and ecoterrorists put it in the trash.
Cool. Still not sure how switching from fossil fuels to an actual burning sun on Earth will help fix global warming....
🤞
'approaching completion' def not ! 'could pave the way for the future' maybe ...
I visited ITER - tokamak based / deuterium fuel fusion is extremely unlikely to be the comercial choice
🧠 the fuel for ITER depends on ☢️Fission Reactors for Tritium - and - 💥Nuclear Weapons Manufacturing for Enriched Lithium 6 (for tritium breeding). Please explain how this is clean & free & sustainable & unlimited energy?
💲 The current estimated cost of ITER is over 65 Billion and climbing.
This article misses some essential points. Says 'approaching completion' but construction has been stopped for 6 months due to objections from the nuclear safety authority, ASN. When will the construction be authorised to restart? Seems like an essential point.
Tritium and Lithium 6 are difficult to make, and T decays rapidly, so risk of fuel running out. High maintenance costs due to neutron and heat damage. High construction costs. Likely that fusion electricity will not be commercially viable.
Clean Energy
Neat! I've actually just recently been looking into details of stellar nucleosynthesis and nuclear fusion for a story I've been working on. This is a great read
When £20 Billion was considered EXPENSIVE!!! .
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