The world's largest fusion reactor has been built in France: it will work only in 15 years. Photo and video

The world's largest fusion reactor has been completed in France by installing the last magnetic coil. But the reactor itself will not be fully operational until 2039.

The first full test of the International Thermonuclear Energy Project (ITER) fusion reactor, which consists of 19 massive coils spun into multiple toroidal magnets, was scheduled for 2020. However, scientists now say it won't be operational until 15 years later, writes Livescience.

This means that fusion power, in which ITER is leading the way, is unlikely to become a solution to the climate crisis in time.

"Certainly the ITER delay is not going in the right direction. In terms of the impact of nuclear fusion on the problems facing humanity, we should not wait for nuclear fusion to solve them. That is foolish," said ITER CEO Pietro Barabaschi.

Thirty-five countries worked on the world's largest nuclear fusion reactor: the United States, China, India, Russia and the European Union.

The ITER has the world's most powerful magnet, making it capable of creating a magnetic field 280,000 times stronger. It is a magnet of such strength as protects the Earth.

The exceptional design of the reactor has entailed a much higher cost than intended. At first, it was planned to cost around 5 billion dollars and the reactor would be launched in 2020. But due to numerous delays and refinements, ITER's budget topped $22 billion, with an additional $5 billion proposed to cover the extra cost.

Scientists have been trying to harness the power of nuclear fusion - the process by which stars burn - for more than 70 years. By fusing hydrogen atoms to form helium under extremely high pressures and temperatures, main-sequence stars turn matter into light and heat, producing vast amounts of energy and no greenhouse gases or long-term radioactive waste.

But replicating the conditions at the hearts of stars is no easy task. The hardest work is with plasma. Fusion reactors require very high temperatures (many times higher than solar temperatures) because they must operate at much lower pressures than in the cores of stars.

The core of the real Sun reaches temperatures of about 15 million Celsius, but has a pressure about 340 billion times that of air at sea level on Earth.

Getting the plasma to these temperatures is the relatively easy part, but finding a way to lock it down so that it doesn't burn through the reactor or derail the fusion reaction is technically difficult. This is usually done with lasers or magnetic fields.

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