A Brief History of ITER

Abstract

Nuclear fusion researchers long realized that international cooperation was the best way to go: fusion is a complex scientific discipline that requires very large and sophisticated instruments. Against this background the European Union built the “Joint European Torus” in Culham (United Kingdom), which was inaugurated in 1984 and is still the world’s most powerful tokamak. The idea of ITER came up in November 1985 when the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev and the then President of the United States Ronald Reagan met in Geneva for the first time. In the press release they “advocated the widest practicable development of international cooperation in obtaining [fusion] energy, which is essentially inexhaustible, for the benefit of all mankind.” The start of ITER was however quite laborious. It was only in 1988, three years after the Geneva meeting, that a joint committee was established to work on the initial design of the machine with the participation of the Soviet Union, the United States, Europe, and Japan. The aim was first to determine the main characteristics of the machine. This work ended in December 1990. In July 1992 the ITER members decided to initiate the technical design phase that was intended to create detailed plans of the machine. However, these activities took longer than expected. Meanwhile, the United States withdrew from the consortium in July 1998. The final detailed design of ITER was eventually completed in 2001. Then the members had to decide where to build ITER. The “ITER Agreement” was formally signed on November 21, 2006 at the Elysée Palace in Paris in the presence of French President Jacques Chirac. It entered into force on October 24, 2007 after ratification by all the members officially establishing the “ITER Organization.” The intergovernmental organization was formally installed in the commune of Saint-Paul-lez-Durance near Cadarache and construction work began on-site at the end of 2007.