It looks like such an amazingly complex system that even though it may work, I'm willing to bet it is malfunctioning more than functioning.

Well construction is no where near finshed so it is neither functioning nor malfunctioning. But once everything is complete, even if there is a malfunction at least there will not be radioactive fuel released into the environment and wreck havoc like Chernobyl and Fukushima.

it is correct, it dates back to president francois miterand era, at least the research and the plasma flowing, the lasers to be used as sensors, inside the flowin', and there is lots of fractals mathematics too. am not an engineer, am only aware it dates back to early 2000s.

Nuclear Fusion is the energy source of our future. It ll be only a matter of time until most energy problems become obsolete. Hopefully it ll be not in the distant future.

#4 i hope so... but what if not? What then? I wouldn't sit back and take comfort just yet.

I wonder if we are able to make gold by fusion some day.

There will be electricity or there will be no France...

It's either working fusion or WWIII. No one is willing to cut down their energy uses, efficiency can not improve fast enough and the sheer amount of devices and technologies using electricity grows much faster.

What people seem to forget is what the effect will be of having what is essentially a piece of the sun right here on earth. I'm not worried about ITER, which is only a prototype with a rather low output of 500 MW, but I am worried about scaling it up to 'solve the energy crisis'. All the energy we 'consume' is not consumed, as the law of conservation of energy tells us, but converted into heat. That heat ends up in the atmosphere. In the long run this might be worse than the greenhouse effect that is currently messing up our climate.

On the other hand, maybe it will prevent the next ice age. ;-)

Does it have an 'OFF' switch