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'A Star in a Bottle' article in the New Yorker

An audacious plan to create a new power source that could save the planet from catastrophe. But time is running out.

This is the subtitle of an extensive article on the ITER project published in the New Yorker this week and authored by Raffi Khatchadourian, with an overview of the events leading up to the ITER project where it stands today.

Khatchadourian puts the plan to create a new energy source in historical perspective, includes exchanges with ITER engineers and Stefano Chiocchio (ITER’s head of design integration) and discusses the political underpinnings. With Guenter Janeschitz - a senior adviser in the director-general’s office - he reports on his visit of the construction site, the challenges that remain for ITER and the roadmap that should lead to commercial fusion reactors.

In the end of his article in the New Yorker, the author calls upon an evening sitting down with an ITER physicist in a café near the work site... and when you read between the lines, you can find out his own view.