The International Thermal Power Plant (ITER) is planned to start providing clean, carbon-free energy in 2025.
However, CEO Pietro Barabaschi told AFP during a visit to the project last week that it could take years to start producing useful energy.
The project was implemented in southern France in the 1980s and aims to produce commercial electricity through a nuclear synthesis reactor, which is expected to become a large-scale source of non-carbon energy by 2025. But according to Mr. Barabaschi, that day "was not practical from the beginning" and now the project has to face two new challenges.
The first problem is that the wrong measurements for the joints of the blocks need to be welded together to form a reactor chamber. Second is the recent discovery of traces of corrosion in the thermal barrier - a heat storage device created in the nuclear synthesis reaction.
Mr. Barabaschi said that solving these problems "is not just a few weeks, but a few months, even many years".
During the synthesis process, the light atoms are pressed together in a hot plasma, kept in a cake-shaped device called tokamak. The goal is to create a safe and almost unlimited power supply.
ITER was launched in 1985, after a summit between then-US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The project has faced a series of technical challenges and cost problems over many years. Currently, ITER is being developed by companies from China, the EU, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the US.
ITER is also known as the world's largest "artificial sunrise" in China. On November 23, 2022, Global Times said that the production of core components of the next-generation "artificial sun" - the full-sized prototype of the first heat-transmitting extended wallpaper (EHF FW) - has been completed in China with core indices significantly better than design requirements, and meeting the conditions for mass production.
China signed an agreement to launch the ITER project with six other parties in 2006 and has shouldered about 9% of the tasks.
The "artificial sun" research process in China had a breakthrough in October when it reached over 1 million ampe of plasma HL-2M, setting a new record for the operation of the controlled nuclear synthesis reaction in the country.
Russia remains in ITER despite sanctions and the conflict in Ukraine. Most recently, in November last year, Russia provided the project with a giant magnet needed to build tokamak. According to the project's goal, ITER tokamak will be the largest and most powerful thermal equipment in the world.
