My experience at ITER

摘要

One of the first mentions of fusion (at least by implication) is in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea which was published in 1870. The Nautilus submarine is powered by the sun's energy that is stored in the surrounding seawater. Since the late 1940s, many attempts have been made to achieve the necessary conditions to fuse deuterium and tritium (two isotopes of hydrogen), to create fusion power. It turns out Jules Verne wasn't far wrong! The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), based in the south of France, is due to be completed in less than ten years and aims to prove that fusion power is achievable. It uses a 'tokamak', a Soviet invention from the 1960s, which uses magnetic induction to heat the mix of deuterium and tritium to 150 million degrees centigrade (five times the temperature of the Sun's core). The extreme temperature required is one of the main reasons that fusion power has not yet been realised.