After more than a decade of design, manufacturing and construction, the ITER fusion machine officially entered its assembly phase on July 28th 2020 with a grand ceremony broadcast around the globe from Cadarache.
In each of the countries participating in the project to bring a small sustainable sun to Earth, the public’s interest piqued again, and experts hurried to explain why ITER is such a big deal for humankind.
In Slovenia, it was no different. Dr. Mark Pleško, the CEO of Cosylab, the Slovenian company that contributes the most to ITER with its control-system integration knowhow, in the Manager magazine again explained in layman’s terms the importance of ITER.
He put three main engineering challenges of ITER at the forefront: the enormous complexity of the entire system, the vast amount of data streaming, and the fact that some devices have to operate in a specific time sequence, to less than a microsecond.
“However,” Dr. Pleško stresses, “the largest challenge of the ITER project is not that it is the greatest scientific experiment but that it is also a social trial. The participating countries unite almost half of humanity and have to work in unity towards a common goal“.
Interview in Slovenian magazine Manager: https://bit.ly/33AZwZF
