In the foothills of the French Alps, stands a parallel universe. One where Russians, Chinese, Americans and Europeans are spending day after day working together on one shared goal: to find a new way of powering the Earth.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) project, a collaboration between 35 countries, is one of the world’s most important science experiments.
Physicists are attempting to prove that nuclear fusion — the process that powers the sun and stars —can create a source of clean, abundant power that could be a long-term solution to energy security and climate change.
A breakthrough this week seemed to bring that dream a step closer to reality. Scientists in California said they had become the first to achieve “net fusion”, gaining more energy out of a controlled nuclear fusion reaction than they put in. However, if fusion is to become commercialised, analysts say machines modelled on Iter will be the key, even though President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine threatened to scupper the decades-old experiment.
While a number of European countries severed scientific research ties with Russia, Iter was one of a handful of remaining partnerships that western governments allowed to continue.
“The Russian nuclear industry is deeply embedded in nuclear energy activities worldwide,” said Mark Hibbs, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “For this reason, the West is in a deep dilemma; they are under political pressure to diversify their energy sources away from Russia, but if they do that in the nuclear area, that would delay their move to carbon-free energy sources.”
About 90 Russian staff work at the project’s construction site in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, southern France. In November, Russia began preparations to dispatch one of six giant magnets needed to build the fusion reactor from St Petersburg to Marseilles, quashing any lingering speculation that Iter could fall apart as a result of the conflict.
On a tour of the facility, staff told The Times that the decision to continue collaborating with Russia was not uncontroversial. Some wanted Iter to take a more openly critical stance of events, starting with a statement on its website, condemning the war.
But Pietro Barabaschi, Iter’s new director-general, believes the project’s strength has always been its ability to rise above events. “Throughout Iter’s history, political differences among its members — trade wars, border disputes, and other disagreements — have never affected the collaborative spirit. It is a project of peace,” he said.
The sprawling Iter complex 25 miles north of the university city of Aix-en-Provence houses what will be the world’s largest tokamak, a device that uses a powerful magnetic field to confine plasma in the shape of a doughnut, or torus.
Weighing 23,000 tonnes, this giant machine will heat a gas of charged hydrogen atoms to 150 million degrees celsius, ten times the heat of the sun. At this temperature, colliding particles are able to overcome their natural electromagnetic repulsion and instead fuse, releasing vast amounts of energy.
This is the opposite of traditional nuclear power production, known as fission, which splits heavy atoms in two. Fusion produces roughly four times more energy and does not create long-lived radioactive nuclear waste.
If Iter works, it will represent a big step in providing the template for near-limitless power. Alberto Loarte, the project’s head of science, said that since the advent of refrigeration no one had fought over a salt mine. In the same way, he believes that with fusion, “wars over energy will probably disappear”.
The prospect is tantalising. However achieving fusion is still a way off. Replicating the physics of the centre of the sun is perhaps the most complex engineering challenge that scientists have ever embarked upon.
Yet the old joke about nuclear fusion – that it is always 30 years away – could be losing its punch thanks to a series of recent advances.
On Tuesday, scientists at the US government’s National Ignition Facility in California announced to the world’s media in Washington that for the first time they had demonstrated it was possible to get more energy out of a nuclear fusion reaction than you put in. They fired 192 of the most powerful lasers in the world on a bean-sized golden capsule, creating a net gain of one megajoule of energy.
It marked an important milestone, though there are doubts as to the technology’s practical application. Unlike the American experiment, which is designed to create a succession of instantaneous fusion reactions, Iter and other similar projects are attempting to sustain an ongoing one, which most people in the field believe is a more realistic prototype for a power plant.
Money has been pouring into dozens of private sector ventures too. According to the Fusion Industry Association, private fusion companies raised $2.83 billion in investment in the 12 months to the end of June, mainly in the US but also in the UK.
For its part, Iter was designed to demonstrate a net energy gain sometime around 2035 and by the end of 2050, researchers expected that fusion should be able to produce electricity to the grid. But the project, plagued in its early years by delays and ballooning costs, is running into trouble again.
A combination of unforeseen manufacturing issues and setbacks caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have once more delayed lift off. Barabaschi — who has only been in the job for a month after the sudden death of his predecessor Bernard Bigot — said he was not yet able to give new targets, but that delay would be “a matter of years, not months”.
One of the frustrations, according to Loarte, is that policymakers tend to lose interest in fusion and reduce funding until there is a crisis, when it suddenly picks up again. “Now people want to see this happening very fast, but the reality is that it takes time. If we had kept up the effort that we put in the 80s to develop fusion further, we would’ve been 20 years ahead [of where we are] by now,” Loarte said.
Iter has consistently played down the impact of the war in Ukraine on its operations, despite the European Court of Auditors warning that sanctions against Russia could also lead to further delays and cost increases. A few years ago, Iter was estimated to have cost around $22 billion, but those who work on the project say the project’s true price tag is both growing and hard to divine.
Yet the consequences of war could have been far more severe. Russia announced earlier this year that it would pull out of the International Space Station after 2024 to build its own orbiting outpost, while the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), which operates the Hadron Collider, announced it would cease all co-operation with Russia and Belarus the same year.
Nuclear fusion remains one of the exceptions, analysts say, because had Russia been cut out it would have been catastrophic for all sides.
The West needs the components and expertise being supplied by Russia, a country where the tokamak was first invented in the 1950s. Meanwhile the Russians “understand that in the long term relying on fossil fuel exports will be an extremely risky proposition,” said Hibbs. “They have to be looking for alternative investments that they will be able to export and continue their ambition to influence the rest of the world.”
We know fusion works, the sun is proof of that (Tom Whipple writes). We also know exactly what we have to do to get it to work on Earth: make our own sun.
But from that one simple requirement flows the formidable technical problems that have meant, for 70 years, fusion has always been just over the horizon.
Because while making an artificial sun isn’t actually that hard — as hydrogen bombs prove — controlling one is. How do you contain a mini hydrogen bomb? How do you harness a reaction so hot it will destroy anything it touches?
There are, broadly, two approaches. One was taken by the US team who, this week, announced they had reached a long sought-after milestone: a reaction that created more energy than it received. Their experiment used 192 extremely powerful lasers to implode a fuel pellet while in flight — which then became a miniature sun.
They were able to contain the resulting reaction because it was essentially instantaneous (light would travel an inch in the same time) and because it was small (the total energy released, if it was bought from the grid, would cost pennies).
Scaling this up, though, is so hard that many fusion scientists are sceptical it will happen. To take just one problem, the process is so inefficient that although theirs was technically a net energy output, inefficiencies in powering the laser itself meant that it was still very far from breaking even in a practical sense.
This is why, when it comes to practical fusion reactors, the world is betting big on a very different approach. In Iter, and other tokamaks, scientists aren’t aiming for a lot of short and small reactions but one long, sustained one.
The way they are hoping to achieve that is through magnets. No physical material can contain a plasma at 150 million degrees, but an invisible magnetic field can. Inside a doughnut-shaped container — where one can create nice, flat magnetic field lines — they can, in theory, make and hold a sun.
So why are we still not there? These days, scientists like to say that the physics aspects of the problem are solved; all that remains is just engineering. Engineers like to say that that the “just” in that sentence is doing quite a lot of work.
The plasma is an unstable, broiling soup of superheated particles. Control it in one place and it’s liable to escape in another. Keeping it corralled is a bit like squeezing a balloon, if a balloon was at 150 million degrees.
