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

Sign up to the Independent Climate email for the latest advice on saving the planet Get our free Climate email Get our free Climate email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. open image in gallery The ITER facility in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, France You could describe ITER, as various engineers and experts have, as a giant doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber, using coils of superconducting tin and niobium – akin to a “pile of spaghetti”– to generate an astoundingly powerful magnetic “bottle” containing a “soup” of ions in which fusion occurs, creating the “holy grail” of nuclear reactions. Being a nuclear device, paperwork is very important for everything you need.” open image in gallery A technician insulates a component on the central solenoid by hand If those 25,000 pages are followed to a T, the ITER project has the chance of achieving what no other fusion experiment has achieved: a condition known as “break-even”, at which point the device will become self-sustaining, throwing off more energy than it takes to start up the reaction inside it. open image in gallery Workers secure a central solenoid magnet for the ITER project “That’s why I believe ITER will succeed,” Smith says. Inherently, like everything, you’re going to end up coming against some limits, whether they’re cost limits or social limits.” open image in gallery Cooling towers at the Grohnde nuclear plant in Germany Since the discovery of nuclear power in the 1930s, support for nuclear energy and fusion has waxed and waned, becoming a priority after the Second World War, then amid the oil shocks of the 1970s, before losing support in the 1990s after deregulation and Chernobyl vastly lowered the public appetite for costly nuclear programmes.