A diagram of our nuclear future

When the year 2035 arrives, Alberto Loart will already be 71 years old, well beyond the normal retirement age. And there is no guarantee that he will complete his primary assignment as director of the science department at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), under construction since 2007 near Bouches-du-Rhône, in southern France. The futuristic reactor, conceived and designed since the 1990s, contains both sophistication and ambition – which is why it still has the outlines of an illusion. Will humanity finally be able to produce more energy than is expended through the process of nuclear fusion, which causes atoms to collide to produce heat, and drive turbines to produce power?

On paper, everything is simpler: the initial plan foresaw the first tests at the end of this decade, given that the reactor was still under construction. But when we started assembling the components, we ran into technical difficulties,” admits the Spanish scientist who leads science at ITER. On the track, there are those who predict that the process, which was set to take place in 2035, should slip towards the end of that decade: “At the moment, to be honest, we don’t know when it will be,” Lowart explains.

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