Fusion Technology for ITER, the ITER Project. Further Development Towards a DEMO Fusion Power Plant (3/4)

<!--HTML-->This is the second half of a lecture series on fusion and will concentrate on fusion technology. The early phase of fusion development was concentrated on physics. However, during the 1980s it was realized that if one wanted to enter the area of fusion reactor plasmas, even in an experimental machine, a significant advance in fusion technologies would be needed. After several conceptual studies of reactor class fusion devices in the 1980s the engineering design phase of ITER started in earnest during the 1990s. The design team was in the beginning confronted with many challenges in the fusion technology area as well as in physics for which no readily available solution existed and in a few cases it was thought that solutions may be impossible to find. However, after the initial 3 years of intensive design and R&D work in an international framework utilizing basic fusion technology R&D from the previous decade it became clear that for all problems a conceptual solution could be found and further developed. In the first lecture several of the most challenging problems and their solution will be described. It will be shown that the ITER design is based on a strong R&D and prototyping program mostly performed during the 1990s. The last part of the first lecture and the initial part of the second lecture will concentrate on the present ITER design and some remaining challenges as well as on the status of the ITER project as of today. In the latter part of the second lecture an overview of the remaining technology challenges to be tackled when advancing from ITER to a DEMO fusion reactor will be given. As a summary the presently envisaged timescale as seen in the EU to arrive at an electricity producing DEMO will be shown and the personal opinion of the author how this can be accelerated if an APOLLO like program would be started for fusion will be given.