ITER Organization

Yeah.

The first time I became aware of, of nuclear fusion in the commercial world was the introduction to ITER.

Mm-hmm.

And the first graph that I got presented was the investment requirements over the next 50 years.

I, I think perhaps more than 10 or nearly 10, uh, such demonstrators have been proposed or are in the process of being built.

'Cause remember only 10 years ago, there was only one plant which was being built.

That was the ITER, which still has not finished yet, so [laughs] but now in China, in the States and also in Korea, Germany, people are racing to build those power plants.

And in the UK as well, we have the test facility down in the UKEA.

Mm-hmm.

It's the ITER fusion reactor.

The Europeans are betting the store on it.

The Europeans are putting $10 billion, uh, into the ITER on a scale of the Large Hadron Collider, and, uh, it uses seawater.

The ultimate fuel for a fusion reactor is seawater.

And realize that Mother Nature does not use uranium.

Mm-hmm.

To try to stabilize that, to, to uniformly squeeze hydrogen gas is the $64,000 question.

You know, fusion reactors.

There's the ITER project in, in France, of course, and China has their, uh, fusion reactors.

But in terms of tokamak, uh, reactors and things like that, the US has fallen significant behind, uh, sig- significantly behind in terms of research on this now, sort of two to, two to three years behind China.

So the solutions that are available, um, that could solve these problems on a longer term basis aren't really, um, you know, things that are, are motivated by policy right now or motivated by the structure of the market.

It's so huge that the force of gravity holds the plasma in a near-perfect sphere, with pressure at its core reaching 150 grams per centimeter cubed, so dense a teaspoon would weigh close to a kilogram.

The biggest fusion reactor on Earth, ITER, in France, a leading international project that hopes to be operational in 2034, will use just a few grams of plasma material in a chamber of 830 cubic meters.

Because it's under such low pressure, meaning particles aren't squeezed together like they are in the sun, this plasma has to be much, much hotter to achieve fusion, 150 million degrees Celsius as opposed to 15 million degrees at the core of the sun.

Now, fairly obviously, you can't just hold a material like this in a container made of normal matter.

Magnetic confinement takes advantage of this by using a ring of powerful magnets to hold plasma in a continuous donut-shaped blob in which fusion can take place.

There are a number of different types, stellarators and reversed-field pinch devices, but the leading design is called the tokamak.

This is the type of reactor which will be used at ITER.

In contrast, inertial confinement fusion, the other confinement method, takes its inspiration from thermonuclear bombs.

And until December of 2022, it was the method that was generally thought to lead to ignition.

This magnetic form of fusion is how the ITER, the world's largest fusion project currently under construction in southern France, will generate the reaction.

After fusion occurs, heat from the reaction can be used to warm water, heat it up to become steam, and this steam can drive a turbine to produce energy.

This last part is basically how every form of major grid energy is produced, from coal to nuclear.

After more than 70 years of effort and cumulative global investment exceeding $60 billion, no fusion reactor has yet produced more energy than it consumes for any sustained period.

The ITER project in southern France, the largest fusion experiment ever built, aims to demonstrate net energy gain in controlled fusion, but significant milestones remain years away.

Even if ITER succeeds in all its objectives, the path from a massive stationary ground-based reactor to a compact, lightweight, space-rated engine that operates continuously for decades in deep space spans engineering challenges that no current program addresses.

Grant fusion propulsion anyway.

Assume a theoretically perfect engine, no structural mass penalty, no thermal losses, maximum exhaust velocity of 10,000 km per second.

Right now, no.

When I was in college, I wrote a paper on ITER, the I-T-E-R, which is being built in France.

It is a fusion reactor designed to fuse a plasma and make it hot so that it can keep the reaction going.

They're still not done with it, and I estimate they're probably at least 20 years away from finishing it.

So, you know, what I really urge our listeners to do is go and listen to the entire speech, because there's quite a lot of misleading information going on by fake news.

But what he did actually state that a lot of investment is going on in the ITER data center, which is good for the US economy.

So, you know, I think right now it is definitely becoming a political point.

Now, let's do one thing, you know, Harsh, let's go and talk about some key consideration for an ITER data center.

Now, we talked about computing power.

So the most important difference is the amount of and type of computing power that is required, isn't it? And AI facilities increasingly depend on large GPUs that we talked about, specialized AI accelerators that are capable of working together on enormous models, right?

Controlled fusion propulsion, the engine at the heart of both designs, has not been achieved in any practical form despite decades of research and billions of dollars of investment.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor currently under construction in France aims to demonstrate sustained fusion power.

but is not expected to produce net energy until the 2030s at the earliest, and the leap from a ground-based fusion reactor to a spaceflight-rated fusion engine is enormous.

If controlled fusion propulsion were somehow mastered and miniaturised for spaceflight, the most optimistic crewed mission profiles suggest cruise velocities of perhaps 5-10% of the speed of light.

And interestingly, you probably know this, that NIF test is an inertial confinement fusion experiment.

A lot of the commercial proposals that are attempting to commercialize fusion in the near term are more like the ITER device in France that is a magnetic confinement fusion.

It's a slightly different approach, and seeing real breakthroughs in the ITER device may be quite a few years from now.

So you know, we await some breakthroughs in things like the first wall protection, things like that.

But for me, I'm here about kind of conventional nuclear energy and advanced fission energy that's sort of on the horizon right now.