The time has come for the world´s largest nuclear fusion reactor

What do The Dark Knight Rises, Back to the Future, Oblivion and Interstellar have in common? It's sci-fi mega-hits showcasing a technology that scientists consider the Holy Grail of energy: nuclear fusion. Since the 1950s, moviegoers, scientists, and clean energy enthusiasts everywhere have been obsessed with how we can harness the inexhaustible amount of energy that resides in atoms by creating our own miniature suns. Unfortunately, practical nuclear fusion technology has remained just that - a dream and a distant mirage. Until now, that is. After 35 years of careful preparation and countless delays, scientists have finally started the five-year construction phase of the massive International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the largest fusion reactor in the world, in Saint-Paul-les-Durance, France. Funded by six nations including the US, Russia, China, India, Japan and South Korea, ITER will be the largest tokamak fusion facility in the world at an estimated cost of around US $ 24 billion and will be able to generate around 500 MW of thermal fusion energy by 2025 . Practical fusion energy Initially, the United States and the former Soviet Union were the first to conduct fusion research because of their potential for developing nuclear weapons. As a result, fusion technology remained secret until the 1958 "Atoms for Peace" conference in Geneva. In the 1970s, fusion research became "big science" thanks to a breakthrough in the Soviet tokamak. However, it soon became clear that practical nuclear fusion would only bring the desired progress through international cooperation because of the high cost and complexity of the devices. Related: ExxonMobil & Berkeley Makes Major Breakthrough in Carbon Capture Technology In nuclear fusion, hydrogen atoms are essentially beaten together so hard that helium is created and energy in the mass-energy equivalence E = MC2 is released. Fusion is the process by which all stars, from the red dwarfs to the sun to the most massive supergiants, generate huge amounts of energy in their nuclei by rising to temperatures of 4,000,000 K or higher. Nuclear fusion generates four times as much energy from the same mass of fuel as nuclear fission, a technology that splits atoms, as is currently used in nuclear reactors around the world. Massive gravitational forces in the sun and in the stars create the right conditions for nuclear fusion to proceed at much lower temperatures; however, the much lower mass of the earth (1 / 330,000th of the mass of the sun) and lower gravity mean that much higher temperatures, on the order of hundreds of millions of Kelvin, are required to start and sustain the process of nuclear fusion. Unfortunately, every fusion experiment so far has been energy neutral, as it consumed more energy than it generated. ITER is a nuclear power plant designed to show that carbon-free, energy-positive fusion energy can become a commercial reality. ITER plans to use tokamak reactors to magnetically contain a deuterium-tritium plasma. The great fundamental challenge here is that ITER achieves a higher heat release rate of a fusion plasma than the energy injected into the plasma. It is only natural to wonder what is so different this time around that researchers are confident that ITER won't just be another expensive experiment that ends up in the fusion waste heap.