#iter

High-temperature fusion plasma experiments conducted in the Large Helical Device (LHD) of the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), have renewed the world record for an acquired data amount, 0.92 terabytes (TB) per experiment, in February 2022, by using a full range of state-of-the-art plasma diagnostic devices. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which is currently under construction in France through the international collaboration of seven parties, is expected to generate approximately 1 TB of data per experiment in 10 years, and LHD is currently the only experiment in the world that produces data closely aligned to ITER. The promotion of "Open Science," in which large-scale research data assets are utilized and shared across society, was adopted as a joint statement at the G7 meeting held in Sendai, Japan in 2023. NIFS started full-fledged efforts toward Open Science by establishing the "Open Access Policy" in February 2022 and the "Research Data Policy" in October 2022.

There's a lot going on in the world of fusion right now.

A lot of people are missing why ITER is so expensive and why fusion research is just now getting to the point where it seems feasible for a lot of other companies that aren't ITER. Like, surely we could have just waited a few more years for the technology to mature before diving headlong into this stuff right? Well, no. That's not how anything works, actually.

The ITER project is the Apollo program of fusion. NASA's Apollo project was fucking expensive okay? Tens of billions of dollars, in the sixties! ITER is $22 billion now, which is peanuts compared to Apollo which had a similar effect on industry. The whole point of Apollo, and the reason it was so expensive, is because all the technology it used was new.

Integrated circuit assembly was slow and expensive at the time, but after Apollo everyone saw how well they performed, so an entire new manufacturing process was invented to mass produce them. Fuel cells and solar panels were never going to be a thing without satellites; they were too damn expensive so no one bothered making them. New stitching methods were developed to make the spacesuits, which just so happened to have similar requirements as medical-grade machinery. Each of these industries already existed at the time, but the push to make more of them faster also led to their mass-production and reduced their cost and complexity.

So too with ITER today. Superconducting tape has been a thing, but the amount of tape ITER needs for its huge magnets is currently resulting in the development of new manufacturing methods for it. Superconductors that would have been prohibitively expensive just 10 years ago are in the realm of possibility today. And new superconductors that don't need fucking liquid helium are just starting to become available in the large quantity one needs to be useful.

Also, ITER is designed to react to fusion plasma as it changes, because when it was designed computers weren't fast enough to predict how it would act. While developing the systems needed to do this, much has been learned in terms of how plasma acts when there is fusion happening inside it. This in turn has led to better equations that predict the behavior of plasma, that can run on computers, which will likely lead to better systems for everything that handles plasma.

Basically, now that ITER has done most of the hard expensive research for fusion, smaller organizations are cropping up which will try to do each piece better. This leads to competition which, in the scientific world at least, is going to lead to a wave of rapidly-accelerating technological progress.