Of Interest archive

Tom Slattery, a 15-year-old from the UK, recently enjoyed a visit to the ITER site with his parents. Upon returning home, he addressed the following letter to ITER Communication (which he has given us permission to publish). We think you'll be impressed, like we were. Tom, we wish you all the best in your future career as a physicist!

After having visited the CERN laboratory, viewed the control labs and observed, from afar, the entrance to the tunnels, I felt that almost anything compared to that was bound to disappoint. ITER proved my assumption wrong. From the moment of arrival in the sunny car park, with its view to the distant snow-peaked Alps, I felt distinctly involved in the project at hand.

We drove up to the main site where we were given a once over of the structure of the future facility and also on the workings of nuclear fusion. My first thought was of the sheer size of the project. The area being cleared was enormous! There was machinery at work wherever you looked, earth being flattened, pipes laid, and, in the centre of it all, the construction of the main building itself.

We were driven round the expanse of the site, circling in on the future Tokamak Complex itself. At the moment, it is a huge, walled hole in the ground, punctuated by hundreds of concrete supports, each topped with a rubber plate and each taller than a person. Some of the struts are linear, but a large number of them are in a concentric pattern, marking the circumference of the fusion reactor. Next to the building works, on ground level, stands an industrial crane. When completed, the Tokamak Building will stand a few metres taller than this crane. I have visited the JET and MAST facilities in the Culham Centre for Fusion Research (CCFE), and I realise that ITER dwarfs both these reactors with ease.

The project itself feels like not just an advancement in science, but also common ground for countries involved all over the world, all with a common objective. It appears that now, in this age based on ever-depleting fuel sources, fusion presents the exciting prospect of a sustainable, almost unlimited energy source.

I also felt a sense of pride at the distance that science has come in recent years. As the investigation into particle physics zooms in on smaller and smaller scales, the machines required to perform the experiments become larger and more complicated. Undaunted by this, however, we have continued on and met those requirements, beginning yet another project to delve deeper into the micro world.

So how does this relate to me? The expected date (if all goes well) for First Plasma production is 2020, by which time I will be leaving university and will be ready to work. It is my ambition to work at this site as a physicist working on the experiment. That way I could feel part of something that will change the world that we live in.

Tom Slattery (age 15)