Machines
The World’s
First Fusion
Reactor
Is (Almost)
Ready to
Turn On
N
UCLEAR FUSION HAS BEEN “RIGHT AROUND
the corner” for decades. But now, that
long-promised future is quickly approach-
ing. With tens of billions of dollars on the
line, the International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reactor (ITER) is almost
ready to turn on, 35 years after world lead-
ers, including Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev,
proposed an international collaboration. While the
experimental tokamak—a plasma reactor where
extremely hot, charged plasma creates the conditions
necessary for atoms to fuse and release consider-
able amounts of energy—is one of a handful of veryThe ITER’s 1,400-
ton cryostat base
is lowered into the
tokamak reactor pit.
COURTESY©^ITER^ ORGANIZATION,^HTTP://WWW.ITER.ORG/26 September/October 2020
// BY CAROLINE DELBERT //6