| Directly from ITER page: https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines#2 "ITER will not capture the energy it produces as electricity, but—as first of all fusion experiments in history to produce net energy gain—it will prepare the way for the machine that can." Let me repeat, the project will not produce any usable electricity. It's still an experiment. And the start of the experiment is at the moment planned for 2025. The ITER project started in 2007. That's how much the preparations "just" for the experiment take, even if the previous experiments were done for decades. Also from their FAQ: https://www.iter.org/FAQ#collapsible_2 "one of the missions for the later stages of ITER operation is to demonstrate the feasibility of one or more concepts of tritium production through the Test Blanket Module (TBM) program." Namely, it's an experiment that "in the later stages" should manage to give results that would allow the development of the technology for tritium breeding. Without tritium breeding fusion can't be used commercially. The path for experiments is known, but it's still far from confirmed that the desired results are achievable, as we'll need a lot of new developments which we don't have at the moment for that. Also DEMO can be fully developed only once ITER succeeds, it needs the results from ITER. It's simply very hard, and achievable as an experiment. The still open question is if its really commercially viable, in the sense, if the "hard" stuff can become manageable enough to be useful. |