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News & Media

Latest ITER Newsline

  • Image of the week | More cladding and a new message

    As the October sun sets on the ITER worksite, the cladding of the neutral beam power buildings takes on a golden hue. One after the other, each of the scientifi [...]

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  • Cryodistribution | Cold boxes 20 years in the making

    Twenty years—that is how long it took to design, manufacture and deliver the cold valve boxes that regulate the flow of cryogens to the tokamak's vacuum system. [...]

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  • Open Doors Day | Face to face with ITER immensity

    In October 2011, when ITER organized its first 'Open Doors Day,' there was little to show and much to leave to the public's imagination: the Poloidal Field [...]

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  • Fusion | Turning neutrons into electricity

    How will the power generated by nuclear fusion reactions be converted into electricity? That is not a question that ITER has been designed to answer explicitly, [...]

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  • Fusion world | JET completes a storied 40-year run

    In its final deuterium-tritium experimental campaign, Europe's JET tokamak device demonstrated plasma scenarios that are expected on ITER and future fusion powe [...]

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Of Interest

See archived entries

ITER NEWSLINE -

The early years of fusion: the Russian story

Sometime in the mid-1970s, the Russian Soviet Center for Science Film produced a documentary on the early years of fusion research.

"O lyudyakh I atomakh" ("Of people and atoms") takes us to the very beginning of the fusion adventure, when in 1950 a young soldier named Oleg Lavrentiev wrote a letter to Stalin describing his concept for an "electronic trap." This was later to evolve into "magnetic confinement."

The "heroes" of fusion in Russia are all there: Lavrentiev, Igor Tamm, Igor Kurchatov, Boris Kadomtsev, Lev Artsimovitch. The film even provides a glimpse of Vladimir Mukhovatov, now a senior scientist at ITER, back when he was a young scientist in the control room of T-4 - or was it T-6?  "At the time," he says in this trailer, "we were building one and a half tokamaks every year."


Many more videos are available on the ITER video page...

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