An increasing interest in ITER and fusion
Located not far from the city centre, the round, modern structure of the Baku Stadium usually hosts thousands of sports enthusiasts as they cheer on their teams. For two weeks in November, the world climate summit took over the venue, and fusion energy was once again part of the discussion.
From 11-24 November 2024, the world came together in the capital of Azerbaijan for the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—as the climate change summit is officially called. Under the overall slogan “In solidarity for a green world,” participants to this year’s gathering were expected to set out clear climate plans and mobilize financial resources for the realization of targets agreed on at COP28 in Dubai the year before.
In an emotional plea at the outset of the summit, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell from Grenada emphasized the rising stakes of climate change. “This crisis is affecting every single individual in the world in one way or another. […] It is here that the Parties need to agree to find a way out of this mess.”
Fusion energy, as a potential contribution to a carbon-free future, is becoming a fixture at the climate change summit—ITER first held up the fusion flag at the COP21 in Paris in 2015 and also participated in the 2017, 2021 and 2023 editions; the first panel discussion on fusion was organized at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021; and fusion made quite a splash last year at COP28 in Dubai. This year, supported by EUROfusion, the private fusion industry and the Clean Air Task Force, the ITER project set up its stand in the Green Zone and continued feeding the increasing appetite for hearing about progress in the development of fusion energy. “We have you on our radar,” said Adil Aliyev advisor to the president of Azerenergy, Azerbaijan’s largest electrical power producer, and member of the National Assembly.
The many visitors to the stand—students, scientists, climate activists and political decision-makers—all showed a keen interest in the ITER project. Discussions revolved most frequently around the project’s ambitious science and precision engineering, its international nature, and the latest news and updates.
ITER Deputy Director-General for Corporate Luo Delong was pleased with the number of interactions he had on the ITER stand with young visitors. “We need more education and more promotion of fusion to attract young people to join the quest.”
In two panel discussions organized at the ITER stand by the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and chaired by ITER’s Luo Delong, experts looked at ways to accelerate the development of fusion energy.
At the first panel, Sehila Gonzales from CATF, Jose Aguilar from the fusion materials project IFMIF-DONES, Andrew Smith from the American Nuclear Society, Gale Hauck from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Anders Wulff from the newly founded European Fusion Association all agreed that international cooperation is key to speeding up commercial fusion deployment. They listed the areas that stood to benefit in particular from joining efforts internationally as: fusion industry standardization, material testing, the development of global markets and supply chains, data sharing and storage, and the development of a skilled workforce.
The second panel focused on the rapid advancements in enabling technologies. The ITER stand was the perfect stage for a discussion of a new CATF report on how artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) can accelerate fusion energy in a range of areas, including in materials, superconductors, tritium breeding and diagnostics. CATF’s Sehila Gonzalez was joined by Erik Fernandez of the European Fusion Business Association (EUFBA), Lucio Milanese, the Co-Founder of Proxima Fusion, and Jake Oster of Amazon Web Services.
Gonzalez said that with AI and HPC providing resources that were unimaginable just a few years ago, “we now have the opportunity to develop fusion much faster.” Lucio Milanese predicted how generations of fusion hardware iterations can be leapfrogged. “The more we can model this hardware in silico, the more we can understand the behaviour of systems and sub-systems, from plasmas to different engineering components, without having to spend millions if not billions on hardware development.”
Both panel discussions at the ITER stand demonstrated how quickly the fusion field is evolving, and how public and private fusion initiatives are joining together to develop fusion as a clean, safe and abundant source of energy.
Read a related article on how ITER is collaborating with the private fusion sector here.
Click to watch the fusion panel discussions:
Panel 1: "International collaboration: A tool to speed up commercial fusion deployment"
Panel 2: "Fusion 3.0: The combined effect of AI & high-performance computing to deploy fusion energy"