The world’s first fusion reactor is (almost) ready to turn on

around the corner’ for decades. But now, that long-promised future is quickly approaching. With tens of billions of dollars on the line, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is almost ready to turn on, 35 years after world leaders, including Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, proposed an international collaboration. While the experimental tokamak – a plasma reactor where extremely hot, charged plasma creates the conditions necessary for atoms to fuse and release considerable