Chinese President Xi Jinping praises ITER nuclear fusion experiment
- Nation ‘willing to continue to increase scientific exchange and cooperation with all parties to jointly make key breakthroughs’, leader says as assembly of experimental facility starts in France
- Once completed, scientists hope the project will be able replicate the fusion process that happens inside stars
“China is willing to continue to increase scientific exchange and cooperation with all parties to jointly make key breakthroughs,” he said.
The plant in Saint-Paul-les-Durance in Provence, southern France is an important step towards making fusion power available for civilian use. The first experiments are set to begin in December 2025, with the goal of showing that fusion power can be generated sustainably and safely on a commercial scale.
Once finished, the reactor should be able to recreate the fusion processes that occur at the heart of stars at temperatures of up to 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the sun.
Scientists hope that fusion reaction – which in stars involves light atomic nuclei fusing together to form heavier ones which release huge amounts of energy – can provide a clean and powerful energy source, but they have not yet been able to harness the process. Its only successful application has been in the creation of hydrogen bombs.
The ITER is an attempt to hold and control such huge amounts of energy. Construction of the plant began in 2006 and its initial budget has tripled to about €20 billion (US$23.5 billion).