How did I miss this ?

...In the south of France, there is a large international fusion effort underway named ITER (Latin for “the way.”) The project was originally agreed to by Francois Mitterrand, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in 1985, and was officially launched in October 2007...as part of an international collaboration between France, the US, Russia, the UK, the EU, India, China, Korea and Japan. In 2010, the first concrete will be poured.The deuterium will be heated to 150 million degrees centigrade, forming plasma (decomposed hydrogen atoms) which will be contained by electrical and magnetic fields inside the Tokomak pictured left. (Note the size on the person at the bottom right in the picture above.) The plasma particles combine in a fusion reaction to form helium, and release vast amounts of energy in the process – which is captured as heat and used to generate electricity...and the future ?
...The construction work on ITER is expected to come to an end in 2017. A commissioning phase will follow that will ensure all systems operate together and prepare the machine for the achievement of the first plasma. ITER's operational phase is expected to last for 20 years. First a several-year "shakedown" period of operation in pure Hydrogen will be run during which the machine will remain accessible for repairs, in order to test the most promising physics regimes. This will be followed by operation in Deuterium with a small amount of Tritium to test sheilding provisions. Finally, scientists will launch a third phase with increasingly frequent full operation with an equal mixture of Deuterium and Tritium, at full fusion power...more here...

...The legacy of Reagan and Thatcher lives on. If ITER is a success, then it will effectively move humanities energy generation into overdrive, and the promise of abundant energy "too cheap to meter" will come very much closer... More from WuWT here...