8. Nuclear power plants in the world

Nuclear power stations operate in 31 countries. China has 28 new reactors under construction and there are also a considerable number of new reactors being built in South Korea, India, and Russia. At the same time, at least 100 older and smaller reactors will "most probably be closed over the next 10-15 years". So the expanding nuclear programs in Asia are balanced by retirements of aging plants and nuclear reactor phase-outs.

In 2010, before the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, it was reported that an average of about 10 nuclear reactors were expected to become operational per year, although according to the World Nuclear Association, of the 17 civilian reactors planned to become operational between 2007 and 2009, only five actually came on stream. As of June 2011, Germany and Switzerland are phasing-out nuclear power which will be replaced mostly by fossil fuels, and a smaller part renewable energy.

As of 2012, countries such as Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, and Portugal remain opposed to nuclear power. Global nuclear electricity generation in 2012 was at its lowest level since 1999. Of the thirty countries in which nuclear power plants operate, only France, Belgium, Hungary and Slovakia use them as the primary source of electricity, although many other countries have a significant nuclear power generation capacity.

9. Perspectives of thermonuclear power engineering

The first commercial demonstration fusion power plant, named DEMO, is proposed to follow on from the ITER project. ITER is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering mega project, which is currently building the world's largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor adjacent to the Cadarache facility in the south of France. The ITER project aims to make the long-awaited transition from experimental studies of plasma physics to full-scale electricity-producing fusion power plants.

The project is funded and run by seven member entities — the European Union, India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and the United States.

The ITER fusion reactor has been designed to produce 500 megawatts of output power while needing 50 megawatts to operate. Thereby the machine aims to demonstrate the principle of producing more energy from the fusion process than is used to initiate it, something that has not yet been achieved in any fusion reactor. Construction of the ITER Tokamak complex started in 2013 . The facility is expected to finish its construction phase in 2019 and will start commissioning the reactor that same year and initiate plasma experiments in 2020 with full deuterium-tritium fusion experiments starting in 2027.

A tokamak is a device using a magnetic field to confine a plasma in the shape of a torus. Achieving a stable plasma equilibrium requires magnetic field lines that move around the torus in a helical shape. In a tokamak, the toroidal field is produced by electromagnets that surround the torus, and the poloidal field is the result of a toroidal electric current that flows inside the plasma.

The tokamak is one of several types of magnetic confinement devices, and is one of the most-researched candidates for producing controlled thermonuclear fusion power. Magnetic fields are used for confinement since no solid material could withstand the extremely high temperature of the plasma. An alternative to the tokamak is the stellarator.

Tokamaks were invented in the 1950s by Soviet physicists Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov, inspired by an original idea of Oleg Lavrentiev.