Endless clean electricity

It’s called the Iter – or the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor – and it’s an enormous power station that will harness nuclear fusion – the process that powers hydrogen bombs and the centre of the sun – to create a near endless stream of clean electricity.

The sources of all this power are the isotopes deuterium and tritium, which are naturally present in seawater. One litre of seawater, processed through the Iter reactor, will hopefully provide the same amount of energy as 500 litres of petrol – without producing carbon emissions or radioactive waste.

Of course recreating the conditions found inside the sun presents a few logistical problems. Problems like, er how do you contain something so hot it melts anything? Iter’s solution is to trap the 150 million°C reaction (yup, that’s 150 million degrees) inside an incredibly powerful magnetic field. Unfortunately creating this magnetic field in the first place takes a huge amount of electricity – so the $21 billion question is: can the power station create more energy than it uses? Well, the European Union, India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea, and the US all hope so – and they’ve put aside their differences to work on the project in the hope of a first successful run in 2021.

So fingers crossed – if the trial is a success it could completely change the way we live on this planet.