ITER-INTERNATIONAL THERMONUCLEAR EXPERIMENTAL REACTOR

# ITER (originally the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is an international research and engineering project which is currently building the world's largest and most advanced experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor, at Cadarache, France.
# The ITER tokamak could help to make the long awaited transition from today's studies of plasma physics to full scale electricity-producing fusion power plants. The project's members are China, theEuropean Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States.
# The fusion reactor itself has been designed to produce 500 MW of output power for 50 MW of input power, or ten times the amount of energy put in. Hereby the machine is expected to demonstrate the principle of getting more energy out of the fusion process than is used to initiate it, something that has not been achieved with previous fusion reactors.
# Construction of the facility began in 2008 and first plasma is expected in 2018. When ITER becomes operational it will surpass the Joint European Torus which is the current largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment in use. The first commercial demonstration fusion power plant named DEMO is proposed to follow on the research of ITER to bring fusion energy to the commercial markets.