ITER is designed to return 500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of input heating power

Background

ITER ("The Way" in Latin) is a magnetic fusion device that has been designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy based on the same principle that powers our Sun and stars. It is being built at Saint Paul-lez-Durance, southern France, and the ITER Organization says 34 nations are collaborating on it. The ITER Members - China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States - are engaged in a decades-long collaboration to build and operate the device. The primary objective of ITER is the investigation and demonstration of burning plasmas, in which the energy of the helium nuclei produced by the fusion reactions is enough to maintain the temperature of the plasma, reducing or eliminating the need for external heating. With five times the plasma volume of the largest machine operating today, the machine is designed to generate 500 MW of fusion power in its plasma: a ten-fold return on power (Q=10), or 500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of input heating power. By comparison, in 1997, JET produced 16 MW of fusion power from a total input heating power of 24 MW (Q=0.67). ITER will not convert the heating power it produces as electricity. A later mission is to demonstrate the feasibility of producing tritium from lithium within the vacuum vessel, because the world supply of tritium is not sufficient to cover the needs of future power plants. The ITER Organization was licensed as a nuclear operator in France, and the idea for an international joint experiment in fusion was first launched in 1985.