Hi All

The website for ITER has a neat diagrammatic summary of what the New Scientist news article discussed...

...which is found on this page Beyond ITER

Was presented at a conference in 2004 and reflects the extra funding courtesy of France and Japan which allows the materials testing facility to be built in parallel to ITER thus compressing the timescale for a demo reactor.

That's an important point - sustained fusion can now be designed for in a reactor. ITER will be a burning plasma reactor - i.e. it will be self-heating from fusion reactions, using about 1/2 the fusion energy to heat the plasma in a sustained way for several minutes at a time. A somewhat higher power level and it will be able to "leak out" some heat for actual power production. "Break even" where the energy liberated equals the energy put in has already been achieved in current tokamaks, but for net power generation it has to self-heat the plasma and the lithium jacket and breed tritium in that jacket. So the goal is over break-even operation, thus ITER.

But note that point - fusion has reached "breakeven" in gross energy terms. What's next is net useful energy production.

A milestone has been passed and we missed it.

Adam