Is a $22bn giant magnet the ‘holy grail’ of clean energy?

At a certain point, even language fails to fully capture all the wild and wondrous things going on inside ITER, a 23,000-tonne, 35-nation nuclear experiment under construction in France.You could describe ITER – massive as it is – as a miniature. A manmade mini-star on Earth. At its core, plasma will be heated to 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times the temperature of the core of the sun, hot enough to melt diamonds and rotating faster than the speed of sound, causing hydrogen ions to fuse and release massive amounts of energy.You could describe ITER – hi-tech as it is – as something of a perestroika relic, the result of an initiative proposed in 1985 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The goal: to collaborate on obtaining a source of nuclear energy that is “essentially inexhaustible, for the benefit for all mankind”.The ITER facility in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance,…

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