Eat me... ITER...

What's up with ITER ? When is Fusion ever gonna become a reality ? I want my miniature sun now ! They got that CERN built already and Hollywood even stole some anti-matter from there to make a mini black hole to suck up the Vatican. When are we gonna get ITER done ? Seems like a lot of smart people are working on it, but it seems as Prof. Niek Lopes Cardozo, "Building ITER is like building the space station, but having to set up NASA and ESA in the process." Hmmm, that doesn't sound so good.

Norbert Holtkamp, ITER's principal deputy director-general says, "ITER is an abbreviation for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and it also has a Latin meaning—iter means "the way" in Latin. ITER is the intent to build the largest fusion reactor experiment in the world. A much smaller version of it exists now. JET —the Joint European Torus—the largest nuclear fusion experimental reactor device yet built, began operating in 1983 near Culham, England. ITER is the next step toward constructing fusion power reactors to generate electricity."

Here in the U.S. we have PPPL. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is a collaborative national center for plasma and fusion science. Its primary mission is to develop the scientific understanding and the key innovations which will lead to an attractive fusion energy source. Good luck with that. But hey, it's good science. C'mon Fusion !!!

photo by Mamiya Rinzoo at PPPL