title: Crossing the Rubicon

text: Exercising "imperium" when forbidden by the law was a capital offense. Furthermore, obeying the commands of a general who did not legally possess "imperium" was a capital offense. If a general entered Italy in command of an army, both the general and his soldiers became outlaws and were automatically condemned to death. Generals were thus obliged to disband their armies before entering Italy.


title: Crossing the Rubicon

text: In January 49 BC C. Julius Caesar led a single legion, Legio XIII, south over the Rubicon from Cisalpine Gaul to Italy to make his way to Rome. In doing so, he deliberately broke the law on "imperium" and made armed conflict inevitable. Roman historian Suetonius depicts Caesar as undecided as he approached the river and attributes the crossing to a supernatural apparition. It was reported that Caesar dined with Sallust, Hirtius, Oppius, Lucius Balbus and Sulpicus Rufus on the night after his famous crossing into Italy on 10 January.


title: Crossing the Rubicon

text: According to Suetonius, Caesar uttered the famous phrase "ālea iacta est" ("the die has been cast"). The phrase "crossing the Rubicon" has survived to refer to any individual or group committing itself to a risky or revolutionary course of action, similar to the modern phrase "passing the point of no return". Caesar's decision for swift action forced Pompey, the consuls, and a large part of the Roman Senate to flee Rome.


title: Zach LaVine

text: Zachary Thomas LaVine ( ; born March 10, 1995) is an American professional basketball player for the Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He was selected in the first round of the 2014 NBA draft with the 13th overall pick by the Minnesota Timberwolves. A two-time Slam Dunk Contest champion, he was named an NBA All-Star in 2021 and 2022. He also won a gold medal on the 2020 U.S. Olympic team in Tokyo.


title: Zach LaVine

text: LaVine grew up in the Seattle area, where he was honored as the state's top high school player. He played college basketball for the UCLA Bruins. After one season at UCLA, he entered the NBA after being named one of the top freshmen in the Pac-12 Conference. As a rookie with Minnesota, LaVine won the league's Slam Dunk Contest, and was named to the NBA All-Rookie Second Team. In 2016, he became the fourth NBA player to ever win consecutive dunk contests. He was traded to Chicago in 2017.


title: Zach LaVine

text: LaVine was born in the Seattle, Washington suburb of Renton to athletic parents. His father, Paul, played American football professionally in the United States Football League (USFL) and National Football League (NFL), and his mother, CJ, was a softball player. Around the age of five, LaVine developed an interest in basketball after watching Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan in the film "Space Jam". Later, he also became a fan of Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant, and modeled his game after his childhood idols.


title: Zach LaVine

text: LaVine practiced playing in the family backyard, where his father had him repeatedly emulate the NBA's Three-Point Shootout. He attended Bothell High School in the Seattle suburb of Bothell. Playing point guard, he was their primary ball handler. By his junior year, he had grown to , and he would practice dunking for hours in his backyard after his shooting routine would end.


title: Zach LaVine

text: As a senior, he averaged 28.5 points, 3.4 rebounds, and 2.5 assists per game, and was named the 2013 Associated Press Washington state player of the year and Washington Mr. Basketball. He was also recognized nationally as a first-team "Parade" All-American. He played in the Ballislife All-American Game, and won the event's slam dunk contest. Considered a four-star recruit by Rivals.com, LaVine was listed as the No. 12 shooting guard and the No. 44 player in the nation in 2013.


title: Zach LaVine

text: On June 20, 2012, LaVine verbally committed to attending the University of California, Los Angeles, and playing for coach Ben Howland for the 2013 season. After Howland was fired nine months later, LaVine considered staying in-state and attending the University of Washington instead. However, he decided to remain with UCLA and their new coach, Steve Alford; LaVine had inherited an affection for UCLA from his father, who grew up a fan of Bruins basketball while growing up in nearby San Bernardino, California.


title: Zach LaVine

text: After a strong start to 2013–14 as the team's sixth man, featuring an impressive display of outside shooting and explosive dunks, the former point guard LaVine evoked memories of former Bruin Russell Westbrook's UCLA beginnings. NBA draft pundits began ranking LaVine high on their projections for the 2014 NBA draft if he declared himself eligible. ESPN.com draft expert Chad Ford attributed LaVine's appeal to the Westbrook comparisons. At one point, Ford listed him as the 10th overall pick, while NBADraft.net ranked him fifth. During the season, LaVine typically entered the game with coach Alford's freshman son, Bryce Alford, who usually handled the ball, while starter Kyle Anderson was the team's main facilitator. During a six-game span beginning on January 26, 2014, LaVine endured a shooting slump where he made just 7 of 36 shots from the field. He averaged 9.4 points per game during the season, fourth best on the team, and his 48 three-point field goals made were the second most by a freshman in the school's history. However, LaVine did not reach double-figures in scoring in 14 of the final 18 games, and totaled just 11 points and was 0 for 8 on three-point attempts in the final five games. Despite his late-season struggles, he was voted to the Pac-12 All-Freshman Team, and he was named with Bryce Alford as the team's most valuable freshmen.


title: Zach LaVine

text: On April 16, 2014, he declared for the NBA draft, forgoing his final three years of college eligibility.


title: Zach LaVine

text: LaVine was selected by the Minnesota Timberwolves with the 13th overall pick in the 2014 NBA draft. He signed his rookie scale contract with the team on July 8, 2014. Over the first five games of the 2014–15 season, LaVine played a total of 12 minutes. When an ankle injury sidelined starter Ricky Rubio indefinitely, LaVine became the starting point guard over veteran Mo Williams. LaVine moved back into the starting lineup after back spasms sidelined Williams, who had become the starting guard again. On December 6 against the San Antonio Spurs, LaVine had 22 points and 10 assists for his first double-double.


title: Zach LaVine

text: Rubio returned in February 2015, resulting in a dip in playing time for LaVine. However, Williams was also traded that month which opened up more opportunities. LaVine won the Slam Dunk Contest during the 2015 NBA All-Star Weekend. He became the youngest champion since an 18-year-old Kobe Bryant in 1997. With a perfect 50 on each of his first two dunks, he was the first player since Dwight Howard in 2009 with a perfect score on multiple dunks, triumphing over future NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo. LaVine also participated in the Rising Stars Challenge that weekend. On April 11, LaVine had a season-high 37 points, along with nine rebounds, in a loss to the Golden State Warriors. For the season, LaVine played in 77 games, starting in 40, and averaged 10.1 points, 2.8 rebounds, and 3.6 assists, while shooting 42.2 percent overall and 34.1 percent on three-pointers. He was subsequently named to the NBA All-Rookie Second Team.


title: Zach LaVine

text: On October 21, 2015, the Timberwolves exercised their third-year team option on LaVine's rookie scale contract, extending the contract through the 2016–17 season. With Ricky Rubio sidelined in early November, LaVine took over the starting point guard role and took advantage of the increased minutes. On November 13, he scored a season-high 26 points in a loss to the Indiana Pacers. He later topped that mark on December 13, scoring 28 points in a loss to the Phoenix Suns. During the 2016 All-Star Weekend, LaVine scored 30 points for Team USA in the Rising Stars Challenge to capture MVP honors. He also became the fourth player ever to win consecutive Slam Dunk Contests. The final round of the contest, which featured two tie-breakers with Aaron Gordon, drew comparisons to the contest between Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins in 1988.


title: Zach LaVine

text: On October 24, 2016, the Timberwolves exercised their fourth-year team option on LaVine's rookie scale contract, extending the contract through the 2017–18 season. On November 9, he tied his career high with 37 points in a 123–107 win over the Orlando Magic. On December 23, he scored a career-high 40 points and tied a career best with seven three-pointers in a 109–105 loss against the Sacramento Kings. On February 4, 2017, LaVine was ruled out for the rest of the season after an MRI revealed he had a torn ACL in his left knee. Ten days later, he underwent successful surgery to reconstruct the knee.


title: Zach LaVine

text: On June 22, 2017, LaVine was traded, along with Kris Dunn and the rights to Lauri Markkanen (the 7th pick in the 2017 NBA draft), to the Chicago Bulls in exchange for Jimmy Butler and the rights to Justin Patton (the 16th pick in the 2017 NBA draft).


title: Zach LaVine

text: On January 13, 2018, in his first game in 11 months, LaVine scored 14 points in the Bulls' 107–105 win over the Detroit Pistons. On February 9, he scored a season-high 35 points in a 114–113 win over his former team the Minnesota Timberwolves.


title: Zach LaVine

text: On July 6, 2018, the restricted free agent LaVine received a four-year, $80 million offer sheet from the Sacramento Kings. Two days later, the Bulls exercised their right of first refusal and matched the offer sheet extended to LaVine by the Kings. LaVine scored at least 30 points in each of the Bulls' first three games of the season, becoming the third Chicago player to do so, joining Michael Jordan (1986) and Bob Love (1971). On October 24, he made two free throws with 0.5 seconds left to lift the Bulls to a 112–110 win over the Charlotte Hornets. He finished with 32 points for his fourth straight 30-point game to start the season. On November 5, he scored a career-high 41 points, including the game-winning free throw with 0.2 seconds left, as the Bulls beat the New York Knicks 116–115 in double overtime. On November 10, he scored 24 points in a 99–98 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers, thus scoring 20 or more points in each of Chicago's 13 games to begin the season and in a career-high 14 straight overall, dating to his final game of 2017–18. The last Bulls player to score 20-plus points in 14 consecutive games was Jimmy Butler, who did it 15 straight times in 2016. He scored 26 points against the Dallas Mavericks on November 12 for 15 straight, before a 10-point game on November 14 against the Boston Celtics ended the streak. On December 26, after missing five games with a sprained left ankle, LaVine had 28 points in 26 minutes off the bench in a 119–94 loss to the Timberwolves.


title: Zach LaVine

text: On February 23, 2019, he scored a career-high 42 points in a 126–116 win over the Celtics. On March 1, he scored 47 points in a 168–161 quadruple-overtime win over the Atlanta Hawks, the third highest scoring game in NBA history. On March 6, he scored 39 points and hit the go-ahead layup in the closing seconds to lift the Bulls to a 108–107 win over the Philadelphia 76ers. LaVine missed the end of the season with right leg injuries. He led the Bulls in points scored in the season with 1492 points while playing in only 63 games.


title: Zach LaVine

text: In the second game of the 2019–20 season, LaVine scored 37 points in a 110–102 win against the Memphis Grizzlies. On November 16, 2019, Lavine scored 36 points in a loss to the Brooklyn Nets. On November 23, LaVine scored a career high 49 points, with 13 three-point field goals, including the game-winning three pointer to defeat the Charlotte Hornets 116–115. On November 27, he had 36 points against Golden State. On January 25, 2020, LaVine recorded 44 points, ten rebounds and eight assists in a 118–106 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers. On February 11, he scored 41 points on 15-of-21 shooting, including 8 three-pointers, to go with nine rebounds, in a 126–114 loss to the Washington Wizards. On February 25, 2020, LaVine again scored 41 points in a 124–122 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. He was the leading scorer in 42 of the 65 games played in the shortened season.


title: Zach LaVine

text: On February 10, LaVine scored a season-high 46 points with nine 3-pointers in a 129–116 victory over the New Orleans Pelicans. With a new head coach in Billy Donovan and averaging career highs in scoring and shooting efficiency, on February 24, 2021, he was named a reserve for the 2021 NBA All-Star Game. It was his first All-Star selection and the first Bulls player selected since Jimmy Butler in 2017. In the 34th game of the season, LaVine had his 17th game scoring 30 points or more. On March 7, he played 28.19 minutes and scored 13 points during the All-Star game. On April 9, LaVine scored 39 of his career-high 50 points in the first half in a 120–108 loss to the Atlanta Hawks. For the season, he averaged a career-high 27.4 points per game, which ranked seventh in the NBA. He also reached career highs in rebounds (5.0), assists (4.9), 3-point shooting (41.9%), overall field goal percentage (50.7), and free throw percentage (84.9).


title: Zach LaVine

text: On November 19, 2021, LaVine scored a season-high 36 points in a 114–108 road victory over the Denver Nuggets. On February 3, he was named a reserve for the 2022 NBA All-Star Game. He dealt with a troublesome knee during the season and missed 15 games, yet still appeared in his most games since his ACL tear in 2017. The Bulls were playoff-eligible for the first time since 2017, giving LaVine his first career postseason appearance after eight seasons in the league. On April 24, during Game 4 of the first round of the playoffs, he posted 24 points, 5 rebounds and 13 assists in a 95–119 loss against the reigning champions Milwaukee Bucks. The Bulls would go on to lose to the Bucks in five games. On May 24, LaVine underwent left knee surgery. On July 7, LaVine resigned with the Bulls with a new five-year max contract.


title: Zach LaVine

text: On December 4, 2022, Lavine scored a season-high 41 points along with 8 rebounds and 4 steals in a 110–101 loss against the Sacramento Kings.


title: Zach LaVine

text: Lavine was selected as one of the players on Team USA at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, which was postponed to 2021 due to the novel Coronavirus COVID-19 global pandemic. He started one game and was a valuable sixth man averaging 10.6 points. Prior to the gold medal game, he was second in assists, playing solid defense and was shooting a team-best 47% from three-point range. LaVine and Team USA won the Olympic gold medal in men's basketball.


title: Zach LaVine

text: In March 2016, LaVine guest starred in an episode of the Disney XD television series "Kirby Buckets".


title: Zach LaVine

text: In April 2020, LaVine became engaged to his longtime girlfriend. Their first child, a son, was born in August 2022.


title: ITER

text: ITER (initially the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, "iter" meaning "the way" or "the path" in Latin) is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject aimed at creating energy by replicating, on Earth, the fusion processes of the Sun. Upon completion of construction of the main reactor and first plasma, planned for late 2025, it will be the world's largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment and the largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. It is being built next to the Cadarache facility in southern France. ITER will be the largest of more than 100 fusion reactors built since the 1950s, with ten times the plasma volume of any other tokamak operating today.


title: ITER

text: The long-term goal of fusion research is to generate electricity. ITER's stated purpose is scientific research, and technological demonstration of a large fusion reactor, without electricity generation. ITER's goals are to achieve enough fusion to produce 10 times as much thermal output power as thermal power absorbed by the plasma for short time periods; to demonstrate and test technologies that would be needed to operate a fusion power plant including cryogenics, heating, control and diagnostics systems, and remote maintenance; to achieve and learn from a "burning" plasma; to test tritium breeding; and to demonstrate the safety of a fusion plant.


title: ITER

text: ITER's thermonuclear fusion reactor will use over 300 MW of electrical power to cause the plasma to absorb 50 MW of thermal power, creating 500 MW of heat from fusion for periods of 400 to 600 seconds. This would mean a ten-fold gain of plasma heating power (Q), as measured by heating input to thermal output, or Q ≥ 10. , the record for energy production using nuclear fusion is held by the National Ignition Facility reactor, which achieved a Q of 1.5 in December 2022. Beyond just heating the plasma, the total electricity consumed by the reactor and facilities will range from 110 MW up to 620 MW peak for 30-second periods during plasma operation. As a research reactor, the heat energy generated will not be converted to electricity, but simply vented.


title: ITER

text: ITER is funded and run by seven member parties: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The United Kingdom participates through EU's Fusion for Energy (F4E), Switzerland participates through Euratom and F4E, and the project has cooperation agreements with Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan and Thailand.


title: ITER

text: Construction of the ITER complex in France started in 2013, and assembly of the tokamak began in 2020. The initial budget was close to €6 billion, but the total price of construction and operations is projected to be from €18 to €22 billion; other estimates place the total cost between $45 billion and $65 billion, though these figures are disputed by ITER. Regardless of the final cost, ITER has already been described as the most expensive science experiment of all time, the most complicated engineering project in human history, and one of the most ambitious human collaborations since the development of the International Space Station (€100 billion or $150 billion budget) and the Large Hadron Collider (€7.5 billion budget).


title: ITER

text: ITER's planned successor, the EUROfusion-led DEMO, is expected to be one of the first fusion reactors to produce electricity in an experimental environment.


title: ITER

text: Fusion aims to replicate the process that takes place in stars where the intense heat at the core fuses together nuclei and produces massive amounts of energy in the form of heat and light. Harnessing fusion power in terrestrial conditions would provide sufficient energy to satisfy mounting demand, and to do so in a sustainable manner that has a relatively small impact on the environment. One gram of deuterium-tritium fuel mixture in the process of nuclear fusion produces 90,000-kilowatt hours of energy, or the equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal.


title: ITER

text: Nuclear fusion uses a different approach to traditional nuclear energy. Current nuclear power stations rely on nuclear fission with the nucleus of an atom being split to release energy. Nuclear fusion takes multiple nuclei and uses intense heat to fuse them together, a process that also releases energy.


title: ITER

text: Nuclear fusion has many potential attractions. The fuel is relatively abundant or can be produced in a fusion reactor. After preliminary tests with deuterium, ITER will use a mix of deuterium-tritium for its fusion because of the combination's high energy potential. Also this fusion reaction is the easiest to run. The first isotope, deuterium, can be extracted from seawater, which means it is a nearly inexhaustible resource. The second isotope, tritium, only occurs in trace amounts in nature and the estimated world's supply (mainly produced by the heavy-water CANDU fission reactors) is just 20 kilograms per year, insufficient for power plants. ITER will be testing tritium breeding blanket technology that would allow a future fusion reactor to create its own tritium and thus be self-sufficient. Furthermore, a fusion reactor would produce virtually no CO emissions or atmospheric pollutants, there would be no chance of a meltdown, and its radioactive waste products would mostly be very short-lived compared to those produced by conventional nuclear reactors (fission reactors).


title: ITER

text: On 21 November 2006, the seven project partners formally agreed to fund the creation of a nuclear fusion reactor. The program is anticipated to last for 30 years – 10 years for construction, and 20 years of operation. ITER was originally expected to cost approximately €5 billion. However, delays, the rising price of raw materials, and changes to the initial design have seen the official budget estimate rise to between €18 billion and €20 billion.


title: ITER

text: The reactor was expected to take 10 years to build and ITER had planned to test its first plasma in 2020 and achieve full fusion by 2023, however the schedule is now to test first plasma in 2025 and full fusion in 2035. Site preparation has begun near Cadarache center, France, and French President Emmanuel Macron launched the assembly phase of the project at a ceremony in 2020. Under the revised schedule, work to achieve the first hydrogen plasma discharge was 70% complete in the mid of 2020 and considered on track.


title: ITER

text: One of the ITER objectives is a Q-value ("fusion gain") of 10. Q = 1 is called a breakeven. The best result achieved in a tokamak is 0.67 in the JET tokamak. The best result achieved for fusion in general is Q = 1.5, achieved in an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiment by the National Ignition Facility in late 2022.


title: ITER

text: For commercial fusion power stations, engineering gain factor is important. Engineering gain factor is defined as the ratio of a plant electrical power output to electrical power input of all plant's internal systems (tokamak external heating systems, electromagnets, cryogenics plant, diagnostics and control systems, etc.). Commercial fusion plants will be designed with engineering breakeven in mind (see DEMO). Some nuclear engineers consider a Q of 100 is required for commercial fusion power stations to be viable.


title: ITER

text: ITER will not produce electricity. Producing electricity from thermal sources is a well known process (used in many power stations) and ITER will not run with significant fusion power output continuously. Adding electricity production to ITER would raise the cost of the project and bring no value for experiments on the tokamak. The DEMO-class reactors that are planned to follow ITER are intended to demonstrate the net production of electricity.


title: ITER

text: One of the primary ITER objectives is to achieve a state of "burning plasma". Burning plasma is the state of the plasma when more than 50% of the energy received for plasma heating is received from fusion reactions (not from external sources). No fusion reactors had created a burning plasma until the competing NIF fusion project reached the milestone on 8 August 2021. At higher Q values, progressively bigger parts of plasma heating power will be produced by fusion reactions. This reduces the power needed from external heating systems at high Q values. The bigger a tokamak is, the more fusion reaction-produced energy is preserved for internal plasma heating (and the less external heating is required), which also improves its Q-value. This is how ITER plans for its tokamak reactor to scale.


title: ITER

text: The initial international cooperation for a nuclear fusion project that was the foundation of ITER began in 1978 with the International Tokamak Reactor, or INTOR, which had four partners: the Soviet Union, the European Atomic Energy Community, the United States, and Japan. However, the INTOR project stalled until Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985. Gorbachev first revived interest in a collaborative fusion project in an October 1985 meeting with French President François Mitterrand, and then the idea was further developed in November 1985 at the Geneva Summit with Ronald Reagan.


title: ITER

text: Preparations for the Gorbachev-Reagan summit showed that there were no tangible agreements in the works for the summit. However, the ITER project was gaining momentum in political circles due to the quiet work being done by two physicists, the American scientist Alvin Trivelpiece who served as Director of the Office of Energy Research in the 1980s and the Russian scientist Evgeny Velikhov who would become head of the Kurchatov Institute for nuclear research. The two scientists both supported a project to construct a demonstration fusion reactor. At the time, magnetic fusion research was ongoing in Japan, Europe, the Soviet Union and the US, but Trivelpiece and Velikhov believed that taking the next step in fusion research would be beyond the budget of any of the key nations and that collaboration would be useful internationally.


title: ITER

text: Dr. Michael Robert, who is the director of International Programs of the Office of Fusion Energy at the US Department of Energy, explains that, 'In September 1985, I led a US science team to Moscow as part of our bilateral fusion activities. Velikhov proposed to me at lunch one day his idea of having the USSR and USA work together to proceed to a fusion reactor. My response was 'great idea', but from my position, I have no capability of pushing that idea upward to the President.'


title: ITER

text: This push for cooperation on nuclear fusion is cited as a key moment of science diplomacy, but nonetheless a major bureaucratic fight erupted in the US government over the project. One argument against collaboration was that the Soviets would use it to steal US technology and expertise. A second was symbolic and involved American criticism of how the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov was being treated. Sakharov was an early proponent of the peaceful use of nuclear technology and along with Igor Tamm he developed the idea for the tokamak that is at the heart of nuclear fusion research. However, Sakharov also supported broader civil liberties in the Soviet Union, and his activism earned him both the 1975 Nobel peace prize and internal exile in Russia, which he opposed by going on multiple hunger strikes. The United States National Security Council convened a meeting under the direction of William Flynn Martin to discuss the nuclear fusion project that resulted in a consensus that the US should go forward with the project.


title: ITER

text: This led to nuclear fusion cooperation being discussed at the Geneva summit and release of a historic joint statement from Reagan and Gorbachev that emphasized, "the potential importance of the work aimed at utilizing controlled thermonuclear fusion for peaceful purposes and, in this connection, advocated the widest practicable development of international cooperation in obtaining this source of energy, which is essentially inexhaustible, for the benefit of all mankind." For the fusion community, this statement was a breakthrough, and it was reinforced when Reagan evoked the possibilities of nuclear fusion in a Joint Session of Congress later in the month.


title: ITER

text: As a result, collaboration on an international fusion experiment began to move forward. In October 1986 at the Reykjavik Summit, the so-called 'Quadripartite Initiative Committee' (Europe through the Euratom countries, Japan, USSR, and the USA) was formed to oversee the development of the project. The year after, in March 1987, the Quadripartite Initiative Committee met at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters in Vienna. This meeting marked the launch of the conceptual design studies for the experimental reactors as well as the start of negotiations for operational issues such as the legal foundations for the peaceful use of fusion technology, the organizational structure and staffing, and the eventual location for the project. This meeting in Vienna was also where the project was baptized the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, although it was quickly referred to by its abbreviation alone and its Latin meaning of 'the way'.


title: ITER

text: Conceptual and engineering design phases were carried out under the auspices of the IAEA. The original technical objectives were established in 1992 and the original Engineering Design Activities (EDA) were completed in 1998. An acceptable, detailed design was validated in July 2001 to complete the extended EDA period, and the validated design then went through a Design Review that began November 2006 and concluded in December 2007. The design process was difficult with arguments over issues such as whether there should be circular cross sections for magnetic confinement or 'D' shaped cross sections. These issues were partly responsible for the United States temporarily exiting the project in 1999 before rejoining in 2003.


title: ITER

text: At this same time, the group of ITER partners was expanding, with China and South Korea joining the project in 2003 and India formally joined in 2005.


title: ITER

text: There was a heated competition to host the ITER project with the candidates narrowed down to two possible sites: France and Japan. Russia, China, and the European Union supported the choice of Cadarache in France, while the United States, South Korea, and Japan support the choice of Rokkasho in Japan. In June 2005, it was officially announced that ITER would be built in the South of France at the Cadarache site. The negotiations that led to the decision ended in a compromise between the EU and Japan, in that Japan was promised 20% of the research staff on the French location of ITER, as well as the head of the administrative body of ITER. In addition, it was agreed that 8% of the ITER construction budget would go to partner facilities that would be built in Japan.


title: ITER

text: On 21 November 2006, at a ceremony hosted by French President Jacques Chirac at the Élysée Palace in Paris, an international consortium signed a formal agreement to build the reactor. Initial work to clear the site for construction began in Cadarache in March 2007 and, once this agreement was ratified by all partners, the ITER Organization was officially established on 24 October 2007.


title: ITER

text: In 2016, Australia became the first non-member partner of the project. ITER signed a technical cooperation agreement with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), granting this country access to research results of ITER in exchange for the construction of selected parts of the ITER machine. In 2017, Kazakhstan signed a cooperation agreement that laid the groundwork for technical collaboration between the National Nuclear Center of the Republic of Kazakhstan and ITER. Most recently, after collaborating with ITER in the early stages of the project, Canada signed a cooperation agreement in 2020 with a focus on tritium and tritium-related equipment.


title: ITER

text: The project began its five-year assembly phase in July 2020, launched by the French President Emmanuel Macron in the presence of other members of the ITER project.


title: ITER

text: ITER is supervised by a governing body known as the ITER Council that is composed of representatives of the seven signatories to the ITER Agreement. The ITER Council is responsible for the overall direction of the organization and decides such issues as the budget.


title: ITER

text: The ITER Council also appoints the director-general of the project. There have been three directors-general so far:


title: ITER

text: Bernard Bigot, was appointed to reform the management and governance of the ITER project. In January 2019, the ITER Council voted unanimously to reappoint Bigot for a second five-year term. Bigot passed away on May 14, 2022 and his deputy Eisuke Tada will take over leadership of ITER during the search process for the new director.


title: ITER

text: ITER's stated mission is to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power as a large-scale, carbon-free source of energy.


title: ITER

text: The objectives of the ITER project are not limited to creating the nuclear fusion device but are much broader, including building necessary technical, organizational, and logistical capabilities, skills, tools, supply chains, and culture enabling management of such megaprojects among participating countries, bootstrapping their local nuclear fusion industries.


title: ITER

text: The start of the project can be traced back to 1978 when the European Commission, Japan, United States, and USSR joined for the International Tokamak Reactor (INTOR) Workshop. This initiative was held under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency and its goals were to assess the readiness of magnetic fusion to move forward to the experimental power reactor (EPR) stage, to identify the additional R&D that must be undertaken, and to define the characteristics of such an EPR by means of a conceptual design. From 1978 to the middle of the 1980s, hundreds of fusion scientists and engineers in each participating country took part in a detailed assessment of the tokamak confinement system and the design possibilities for harnessing nuclear fusion energy.


title: ITER

text: In 1985, at the Geneva summit meeting in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev suggested to Ronald Reagan that the two countries jointly undertake the construction of a tokamak EPR as proposed by the INTOR Workshop. The ITER project was initiated in 1988.


title: ITER

text: Machine assembly was launched on 28 July 2020. The construction of the facility is expected to be completed in 2025 when commissioning of the reactor can commence and initial plasma experiments are scheduled to begin at the end of that year. When ITER becomes operational, it will be the largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment in use with a plasma volume of 840 cubic meters, surpassing the Joint European Torus by a factor of 8.


title: ITER

text: When deuterium and tritium fuse, two nuclei come together to form a helium nucleus (an alpha particle), and a high-energy neutron.


title: ITER

text: While nearly all stable isotopes lighter on the periodic table than iron-56 and nickel-62, which have the highest binding energy per nucleon, will fuse with some other isotope and release energy, deuterium and tritium are by far the most attractive for energy generation as they require the lowest activation energy (thus lowest temperature) to do so, while producing among the most energy per unit weight.


title: ITER

text: All proto- and mid-life stars radiate enormous amounts of energy generated by fusion processes. Mass for mass, the deuterium–tritium fusion process releases roughly three times as much energy as uranium-235 fission, and millions of times more energy than a chemical reaction such as the burning of coal. It is the goal of a fusion power station to harness this energy to produce electricity.


title: ITER

text: Activation energies (in most fusion systems this is the temperature required to initiate the reaction) for fusion reactions are generally high because the protons in each nucleus will tend to strongly repel one another, as they each have the same positive charge. A heuristic for estimating reaction rates is that nuclei must be able to get within 100 femtometers (1 × 10 meter) of each other, where the nuclei are increasingly likely to undergo quantum tunneling past the electrostatic barrier and the turning point where the strong nuclear force and the electrostatic force are equally balanced, allowing them to fuse. In ITER, this distance of approach is made possible by high temperatures and magnetic confinement. ITER uses cooling equipment like a cryopump to cool the magnets to close to absolute zero. High temperatures give the nuclei enough energy to overcome their electrostatic repulsion (see Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution). For deuterium and tritium, the optimal reaction rates occur at temperatures higher than 100 million °C. At ITER, the plasma will be heated to 150 million °C (about ten times the temperature at the core of the Sun) by ohmic heating (running a current through the plasma). Additional heating is applied using neutral beam injection (which cross magnetic field lines without a net deflection and will not cause a large electromagnetic disruption) and radio frequency (RF) or microwave heating.


title: ITER

text: At such high temperatures, particles have a large kinetic energy, and hence velocity. If unconfined, the particles will rapidly escape, taking the energy with them, cooling the plasma to the point where net energy is no longer produced. A successful reactor would need to contain the particles in a small enough volume for a long enough time for much of the plasma to fuse.


title: ITER

text: In ITER and many other magnetic confinement reactors, the plasma, a gas of charged particles, is confined using magnetic fields. A charged particle moving through a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular to the direction of travel, resulting in centripetal acceleration, thereby confining it to move in a circle or helix around the lines of magnetic flux. ITER will use four types of magnets to contain the plasma: a central solenoid magnet, poloidal magnets around the edges of the tokamak, 18 D-shaped toroidal-field coils, and correction coils.


title: ITER

text: A solid confinement vessel is also needed, both to shield the magnets and other equipment from high temperatures and energetic photons and particles, and to maintain a near-vacuum for the plasma to populate. The containment vessel is subjected to a barrage of very energetic particles, where electrons, ions, photons, alpha particles, and neutrons constantly bombard it and degrade the structure. The material must be designed to endure this environment so that a power station would be economical. Tests of such materials will be carried out both at ITER and at IFMIF (International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility).


title: ITER

text: Once fusion has begun, high-energy neutrons will radiate from the reactive regions of the plasma, crossing magnetic field lines easily due to charge neutrality (see neutron flux). Since it is the neutrons that receive the majority of the energy, they will be ITER's primary source of energy output. Ideally, alpha particles will expend their energy in the plasma, further heating it.


title: ITER

text: The inner wall of the containment vessel will have 440 blanket modules that are designed to slow and absorb neutrons in a reliable and efficient manner and therefore protect the steel structure and the superconducting toroidal field magnets. At later stages of the ITER project, experimental blanket modules will be used to test breeding tritium for fuel from lithium-bearing ceramic pebbles contained within the blanket module following the following reactions:


title: ITER

text: Energy absorbed from the fast neutrons is extracted and passed into the primary coolant. This heat energy would then be used to power an electricity-generating turbine in a real power station; in ITER this electricity generating system is not of scientific interest, so instead the heat will be extracted and disposed of.


title: ITER

text: The vacuum vessel is the central part of the ITER machine: a double-walled steel container in which the plasma is contained by means of magnetic fields.


title: ITER

text: The ITER vacuum vessel will be twice as large and 16 times as heavy as any previously manufactured fusion vessel: each of the nine torus-shaped sectors will weigh approximately 450 tonnes. When all the shielding and port structures are included, this adds up to a total of 5,116 tonnes. Its external diameter will measure , the internal . Once assembled, the whole structure will be high.


title: ITER

text: The primary function of the vacuum vessel is to provide a hermetically sealed plasma container. Its main components are the main vessel, the port structures and the supporting system. The main vessel is a double-walled structure with poloidal and toroidal stiffening ribs between shells to reinforce the vessel structure. These ribs also form the flow passages for the cooling water. The space between the double walls will be filled with shield structures made of stainless steel. The inner surfaces of the vessel will act as the interface with breeder modules containing the breeder blanket component. These modules will provide shielding from the high-energy neutrons produced by the fusion reactions and some will also be used for tritium breeding concepts.


title: ITER

text: The vacuum vessel has a total of 44 openings that are known as ports – 18 upper, 17 equatorial, and 9 lower ports – that will be used for remote handling operations, diagnostic systems, neutral beam injections and vacuum pumping. Remote handling is made necessary by the radioactive interior of the reactor following a shutdown, which is caused by neutron bombardment during operation.


title: ITER

text: Vacuum pumping will be done before the start of fusion reactions to create the necessary low density environment, which is about one million times lower than the density of air.


title: ITER

text: ITER will use a deuterium-tritium fuel, and while deuterium is abundant in nature, tritium is much rarer because it is a hydrogen isotope with a half-life of just 12.3 years and there is only approximately 3.5 kilograms of natural tritium on earth. Owing to this limited terrestrial supply of tritium, a key component of the ITER reactor design is the breeding blanket. This component, located adjacent to the vacuum vessel, serves to produce tritium through reaction with neutrons from the plasma. There are several reactions that produce tritium within the blanket. Lithium-6 produces tritium via (n,t) reactions with moderated neutrons, while Lithium-7 produces tritium via interactions with higher energy neutrons via (n,nt) reactions.


title: ITER

text: Concepts for the breeder blanket include helium-cooled lithium lead (HCLL), helium-cooled pebble bed (HCPB), and water-cooled lithium lead (WCLL) methods. Six different tritium breeding systems, known as Test Blanket Modules (TBM), will be tested in ITER and will share a common box geometry. Materials for use as breeder pebbles in the HCPB concept include lithium metatitanate and lithium orthosilicate. Requirements of breeder materials include good tritium production and extraction, mechanical stability and low levels of radioactive activation.


title: ITER

text: ITER is based on magnetic confinement fusion that uses magnetic fields to contain the fusion fuel in plasma form. The magnet system used in the ITER tokamak will be the largest superconducting magnet system ever built. The system will use four types of magnets to achieve plasma confinement: a central solenoid magnet, poloidal magnets, toroidal-field coils, and correction coils. The central solenoid coil will be 18 meters tall, 4.3 meters wide, and weigh 1000 tonnes. It will use superconducting niobium-tin to carry 45 kA and produce a peak field of more than 13 teslas.


title: ITER

text: The 18 toroidal field coils will also use niobium-tin. They are the most powerful superconductive magnets ever designed with a nominal peak field strength of 11.8 teslas and a stored magnetic energy of 41 gigajoules. Other lower field ITER magnets (poloidal field and correction coils) will use niobium-titanium for their superconducting elements.


title: ITER

text: To achieve fusion, plasma particles must be heated to temperatures that reach as high as 150 million °C and to achieve these extreme temperatures multiple heating methods must be used. Within the tokamak itself, changing magnetic fields produce a heating effect but external heating is also required. There will be three types of external heating in ITER:


title: ITER

text: The ITER cryostat is a large 3,850-tonne stainless steel structure surrounding the vacuum vessel and the superconducting magnets, with the purpose of providing a super-cool vacuum environment. Its thickness (ranging from ) will allow it to withstand the stresses induced by atmospheric pressure acting on the enclosed volume of 8,500 cubic meters. On 9 June 2020, Larsen & Toubro completed the delivery and installation of the cryostat module. The cryostat is the major component of the tokamak complex, which sits on a seismically isolated base.


title: ITER

text: The divertor is a device within the tokamak that allows for removal of waste and impurities from the plasma while the reactor is operating. At ITER, the divertor will extract heat and ash that are created by the fusion process, while also protecting the surrounding walls and reducing plasma contamination.


title: ITER

text: The ITER divertor, which has been compared to a massive ashtray, is made of 54 pieces of stainless-steel parts that are known as cassettes. Each cassette weighs roughly eight tonnes and measures 0.8 meters x 2.3 meters by 3.5 meters. The divertor design and construction is being overseen by the Fusion For Energy agency.


title: ITER

text: When the ITER tokamak is in operation, the plasma-facing units endure heat spikes as high as 20 megawatts per square metre, which is more than four times higher than what is experienced by a spacecraft entering Earth's atmosphere.


title: ITER

text: The testing of the divertor is being done at the ITER Divertor Test Facility (IDTF) in Russia. This facility was created at the Efremov Institute in Saint Petersburg as part of the ITER Procurement Arrangement that spreads design and manufacturing across the project's member countries.


title: ITER

text: The ITER tokamak will use interconnected cooling systems to manage the heat generated during operation. Most of the heat will be removed by a primary water cooling loop, itself cooled by water from a secondary loop through a heat exchanger within the tokamak building's secondary confinement. The secondary cooling loop will be cooled by a larger complex, comprising a cooling tower, a pipeline supplying water from the Canal de Provence, and basins that allow cooling water to be cooled and tested for chemical contamination and tritium before being released into the river Durance. This system will need to dissipate an average power of during the tokamak's operation. A liquid nitrogen system will provide a further of cooling to , and a liquid helium system will provide of cooling to . The liquid helium system will be designed, manufactured, installed and commissioned by Air Liquide in France.


title: ITER

text: The process of selecting a location for ITER was long and drawn out. Japan proposed a site in Rokkasho. Two European sites were considered, the Cadarache site in France and the Vandellòs site in Spain, but the European Competitiveness Council named Caderache as its official candidate in November 2003. Additionally, Canada announced a bid for the site in Clarington in May 2001, but withdrew from the race in 2003.


title: ITER

text: From this point on, the choice was between France and Japan. On 3 May 2005, the EU and Japan agreed to a process which would settle their dispute by July. At the final meeting in Moscow on 28 June 2005, the participating parties agreed to construct ITER at Cadarache with Japan receiving a privileged partnership that included a Japanese director-general for the project and a financial package to construct facilities in Japan.


title: ITER

text: Fusion for Energy, the EU agency in charge of the European contribution to the project, is located in Barcelona, Spain. Fusion for Energy (F4E) is the European Union's Joint Undertaking for ITER and the Development of Fusion Energy. According to the agency's website: F4E is responsible for providing Europe's contribution to ITER, the world's largest scientific partnership that aims to demonstrate fusion as a viable and sustainable source of energy. [...] F4E also supports fusion research and development initiatives [...]


title: ITER

text: The ITER Neutral Beam Test Facility aimed at developing and optimizing the neutral beam injector prototype, is being constructed in Padova, Italy. It will be the only ITER facility out of the site in Cadarache.


title: ITER

text: Most of the buildings at ITER will or have been clad in an alternating pattern of reflective stainless steel and grey lacquered metal. This was done for aesthetic reasons to blend the buildings with their surrounding environment and to aid with thermal insulation.


title: ITER

text: Currently there are seven signatories to the ITER Agreement: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States.


title: ITER

text: As a consequence of Brexit, the United Kingdom formally withdrew from Euratom on 31 January 2020. However, under the terms of the EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the United Kingdom remains a member of ITER as a part of Fusion for Energy following the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020.


title: ITER

text: In March 2009, Switzerland, an associate member of Euratom since 1979, also ratified the country's accession to the Fusion for Energy as a third country member.


title: ITER

text: In 2016, ITER announced a partnership with Australia for "technical cooperation in areas of mutual benefit and interest", but without Australia becoming a full member.


title: ITER

text: Thailand also has an official role in the project after a cooperation agreement was signed between the ITER Organization and the Thailand Institute of Nuclear Technology in 2018. The agreement provides courses and lectures to students and scientists in Thailand and facilitates relationships between Thailand and the ITER project.


title: ITER

text: Canada was previously a full member but pulled out due to a lack of funding from the federal government. The lack of funding also resulted in Canada's withdrawing from its bid for the ITER site in 2003. Canada rejoined the project in 2020 via a cooperation agreement that focused on tritium and tritium-related equipment.


title: ITER

text: ITER's work is supervised by the ITER Council, which has the authority to appoint senior staff, amend regulations, decide on budgeting issues, and allow additional states or organizations to participate in ITER. The current Chairman of the ITER Council is Won Namkung, and the acting ITER Director-General is Eisuke Tada.


title: ITER

text: Each member of the ITER project – The European Union, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States – has created a domestic agency to meet its contributions and procurement responsibilities. These agencies employ their own staff, have their own budget, and directly oversee all industrial contracts and subcontracting.


title: ITER

text: The ITER Agreement was signed by Euratom representing the EU. Fusion for Energy, often referred to as F4E, was created in 2007 as the EU's domestic agency, with headquarters in Barcelona, Spain, and further offices in Cadarache, France, Garching, Germany, and Rokkasho, Japan. F4E is responsible for contributing to the design and manufacture of components such as the vacuum vessel, the divertor, and the magnets.


title: ITER

text: China's contribution to ITER is managed through the China International Nuclear Fusion Energy Program or the CNDA. The Chinese agency is working on components such as the correction coil, magnet supports, the first wall, and shield blanket. China is also running experiments on their HL-2M tokamak in Chengdu and HT-7U (EAST) in Hefei to help support ITER research.


title: ITER

text: ITER-India is a special project run by India's Institute for Plasma Research. ITER-India's research facility is based in Ahmedabad in the Gujarat state. India's deliverables to the ITER project include the cryostat, in-vessel shielding, cooling and cooling water systems.


title: ITER

text: Japan's National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Sciences and Technology, or QST, is now the designated Japanese domestic agency for the ITER project. The organization is based in Chiba, Japan. Japan collaborates with the ITER Organization and ITER members to help design and produce components for the tokamak, including the blanket remote handling system, the central solenoid coils, the plasma diagnostics systems, and the neutral beam injection heating systems.


title: ITER

text: ITER Korea was established in 2007 under Korea's National Fusion Research Institute and the organization is based in Daejeon, South Korea. Among the procurement items that ITER Korea is responsible for four sectors of the vacuum vessel, the blanket shield block, thermal shields, and the tritium storage and delivery system.


title: ITER

text: Russia occupies one of the key positions in the implementation of the international ITER Project. The Russian Federation's contribution to the ITER project lies in the manufacture and supply of high-tech equipment and basic reactor systems. The Russian Federation's contribution is being made under the aegis of Rosatom or the State Atomic Energy Corporation. The Russian Federation has multiple obligations to the ITER project, including the supply of 22 kilometers of conductors based on 90 tonnes of superconducting NbSn strands for winding coils of a toroidal field and 11 km of conductors based on 40 tonnes of superconducting NbTi strands for windings of coils of a poloidal field of the ITER magnetic system, sent in late 2022. Russia is responsible for the manufacture of 179 of the most energy-intensive (up to 5 MW/sq.m) panels of the First Wall. The panels are covered with beryllium plates soldered to CuCrZr bronze, which is connected to a steel base. Panel size up to 2 m wide, 1.4 m high; its mass is about 1000 kg. The obligation of the Russian Federation also includes conducting thermal tests of ITER components that are facing the plasma. Today, Russia, thanks to its participation in the Project, has the full design documentation for the ITER reactor.


title: ITER

text: US ITER is part of the US Department of Energy and is managed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. US ITER is responsible for both the design and manufacturing of components for the ITER project, and American involvement includes contributions to the tokamak cooling system, the diagnostics systems, the electron and ion cyclotron heating transmission lines, the toroidal and central solenoid magnet systems, and the pellet injection systems.


title: ITER

text: In 2006, the ITER Agreement was signed on the basis of an estimated cost of €5.9 billion over a ten-year period. In 2008, as a result of a design review, the estimate was revised upwards to approximately €19 billion. As of 2016, the total price of constructing and operating the experiment is expected to be in excess of €22 billion, an increase of €4.6 billion of its 2010 estimate, and of €9.6 billion from the 2009 estimate.


title: ITER

text: At the June 2005 conference in Moscow the participating members of the ITER cooperation agreed on the following division of funding contributions for the construction phase: 45.4% by the hosting member, the European Union, and the rest split between the non-hosting members at a rate of 9.1% each for China, India, Japan, South Korea, the Russian Federation and the USA. During the operation and deactivation phases, Euratom will contribute to 34% of the total costs, Japan and the United States 13 percent, and China, India, Korea, and Russia 10 percent.


title: ITER

text: Ninety percent of contributions will be delivered 'in-kind' using ITER's own currency, the ITER Units of Account (IUAs). Although Japan's financial contribution as a non-hosting member is one-eleventh of the total, the EU agreed to grant it a special status so that Japan will provide for two-elevenths of the research staff at Cadarache and be awarded two-elevenths of the construction contracts, while the European Union's staff and construction components contributions will be cut from five-elevenths to four-elevenths.


title: ITER

text: The American contribution to ITER has been the subject to debate. The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated the total construction costs to 2025, including in-kind contributions, to be $65 billion, although ITER disputes this calculation. After having reduced funding to ITER in 2017, the United States ended up doubling its initial budget to $122 million in-kind contribution in 2018. It is estimated the total contribution to ITER for the year 2020 was $247 million, an amount that is part of the U.S. Department of Energy's Fusion Energy Sciences program. Under a strategic plan to guide American fusion energy efforts that was approved in January 2021, the U.S. Department of Energy directed the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee to assume that the U.S. will continue to fund ITER for a ten-year period.


title: ITER

text: Support for the European budget for ITER has also varied over the course of the project. It was reported in December 2010 that the European Parliament had refused to approve a plan by member states to reallocate €1.4 billion from the budget to cover a shortfall in ITER building costs in 2012–13. The closure of the 2010 budget required this financing plan to be revised, and the European Commission (EC) was forced to put forward an ITER budgetary resolution proposal in 2011. In the end, the European contribution to ITER for the 2014 to 2020 period was set at €2.9 billion. Most recently, in February 2021, the European Council approved ITER financing of €5.61 billion for the period of 2021 to 2027.


title: ITER

text: The construction of the ITER tokamak has been compared to the assembly of “a giant three-dimensional puzzle” because the parts are manufactured around the world and then shipped to France for assembly. This assembly system is the result of the ITER Agreement that stipulates that member contributions were to be mostly “in-kind” with countries manufacturing components instead of providing money. This system was devised to provide economic stimulus and fusion expertise in the countries funding the project and the general framework called for 90% of member contributions to be in material or components and 10% to be in money.


title: ITER

text: As a result, more than 2800 design or manufacturing contracts have been signed since the launch of the project. According to a 2017 estimate from French Minister for Research, Education and Innovation, Frédérique Vidal, there were 500 companies involved in the construction of ITER and Bernard Bigot stated that €7 billion in contracts had been awarded to prime contractors in Europe alone since 2007.


title: ITER

text: The overall assembly of the tokamak facility is being overseen through a €174-million contract awarded to Momentum, a joint venture between Amec Foster Wheeler (Britain), Assystem (France), and Kepco (South Korea). One of the largest tenders was a €530-million contract for HVAC systems and mechanical and electrical equipment that was awarded to a European consortium involving ENGIE (France) and Exyte (Germany). A tokamak assembly contract worth €200 million also went to a European consortium, Dynamic, that includes the companies Ansaldo Energia (Italy), ENGIE (France), and SIMIC (Italy). The French industrial conglomerate Daher was awarded more than €100 million in logistics contracts for ITER, which includes the shipment of the heavy components from the different manufacturers around the world.


title: ITER

text: In America, US ITER has awarded $1.3 billion in contracts to American companies since the beginning of the project and there is an estimated $800 million in future contracts still to come. The major US contracts include General Atomics being selected to design and manufacture the crucial central solenoid magnet.


title: ITER

text: In 2019, the Chinese consortium led by China Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation signed a contract for machine assembly at ITER that was the biggest nuclear energy contract ever signed by a Chinese company in Europe.


title: ITER

text: Russia is supplying magnet and vacuum-injection systems for ITER with construction being done at the Sredne-Nevsky Shipyard in Saint Petersburg.


title: ITER

text: In India, the contract for construction of the cryostat, one of the fundamental pieces of the tokamak, was awarded to Larsen & Toubro, who also have ITER contracts for water cooling systems.


title: ITER

text: Two of Japan's industrial leaders, Toshiba Energy Systems & Solutions and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, have contracts to manufacture the toroidal field coils for ITER. Construction of another key part of the tokamak, the vacuum vessel, was awarded to Hyundai Heavy Industries and is being built in Korea.


title: ITER

text: The ITER project has been criticized for issues such as its possible environmental impacts, its usefulness as a response to climate change, the design of its tokamak, and how the experiment's objectives have been expressed.


title: ITER

text: When France was announced as the site of the ITER project in 2005, several European environmentalists stated their opposition to the project. For example, the French politician Noël Mamère argued that the fight against global warming would be neglected as a result of ITER: “This is not good news for the fight against the greenhouse effect because we're going to put ten billion euros towards a project that has a term of 30–50 years when we're not even sure it will be effective." However, another French environmental association Association des Ecologistes Pour le Nucléaire (AEPN) welcomed the ITER project as an important part of the response to climate change.


title: ITER

text: Within the broader fusion sector, a number of researchers working on non-tokamak systems, such as the independent fusion scientist Eric Lerner, have argued that other fusion projects would be a fraction of ITER's cost and could be a potentially more viable and/or more cost-effective path to fusion power. Other critics, such as Daniel Jassby, accuse ITER researchers of being unwilling to face up to the technical and economic potential problems posed by tokamak fusion schemes.


title: ITER

text: In terms of the design of the tokamak, one concern arose from the 2013 tokamak parameters database interpolation that revealed the power load on a tokamak divertor would be five times the previously expected value. Given that the projected power load on the ITER divertor will already be very high, these new findings led to new design testing initiatives.


title: ITER

text: Another issue that critics raised regarding ITER and future deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion projects is the available supply of tritium. As it stands, ITER will use all existing supplies of tritium for its experiment and the current state-of-the-art technology isn't sufficient to generate enough tritium to fulfill the needs of future DT fuel cycle experiments for fusion energy. According to the conclusion of a 2020 study that analyzed the tritium issue, “successful development of the DT fuel cycle for DEMO and future fusion reactors requires an intensive R&D program in key areas of plasma physics and fusion technologies.”


title: ITER

text: Proponents believe that much of the ITER criticism is misleading and inaccurate, in particular the allegations of the experiment's "inherent danger". The stated goals for a commercial fusion power station design are that the amount of radioactive waste produced should be hundreds of times less than that of a fission reactor, and that it should produce no long-lived radioactive waste, and that it is impossible for any such reactor to undergo a large-scale runaway chain reaction. A direct contact of the plasma with ITER inner walls would contaminate it, causing it to cool immediately and stop the fusion process. In addition, the amount of fuel contained in a fusion reactor chamber (one half gram of deuterium/tritium fuel) is only sufficient to sustain the fusion burn pulse from minutes up to an hour at most, whereas a fission reactor usually contains several years' worth of fuel.


title: ITER

text: Moreover, some detritiation systems will be implemented, so that, at a fuel cycle inventory level of about , ITER will eventually need to recycle large amounts of tritium and at turnovers orders of magnitude higher than any preceding tritium facility worldwide.


title: ITER

text: In the case of an accident (or sabotage), it is expected that a fusion reactor would release far less radioactive pollution than would an ordinary fission nuclear station. Furthermore, ITER's type of fusion power has little in common with nuclear weapons technology, and does not produce the fissile materials necessary for the construction of a weapon. Proponents note that large-scale fusion power would be able to produce reliable electricity on demand, and with virtually zero pollution (no gaseous CO, SO, or NO by-products are produced).


title: ITER

text: According to researchers at a demonstration reactor in Japan, a fusion generator should be feasible in the 2030s and no later than the 2050s. Japan is pursuing its own research program with several operational facilities that are exploring several fusion paths.


title: ITER

text: In the United States alone, electricity accounts for US$210 billion in annual sales. Asia's electricity sector attracted US$93 billion in private investment between 1990 and 1999. These figures take into account only current prices. Proponents of ITER contend that an investment in research now should be viewed as an attempt to earn a far greater future return and a 2017–18 study of the impact of ITER investments on the EU economy have concluded that 'in the medium and long-term, there is likely to be a positive return on investment from the EU commitment to ITER.'


title: ITER

text: Also, worldwide investment of less than US$1 billion per year into ITER is not incompatible with concurrent research into other methods of power generation, which in 2007 totaled US$16.9 billion.


title: ITER

text: Supporters of ITER emphasize that the only way to test ideas for withstanding the intense neutron flux is to subject materials experimentally to that flux, which is one of the primary missions of ITER and the IFMIF, and both facilities will be vitally important to that effort. The purpose of ITER is to explore the scientific and engineering questions that surround potential fusion power stations. It is nearly impossible to acquire satisfactory data for the properties of materials expected to be subject to an intense neutron flux, and burning plasmas are expected to have quite different properties from externally heated plasmas. Supporters contend that the answer to these questions requires the ITER experiment, especially in the light of the monumental potential benefits.


title: ITER

text: Furthermore, the main line of research via tokamaks has been developed to the point that it is now possible to undertake the penultimate step in magnetic confinement plasma physics research with a self-sustained reaction. In the tokamak research program, recent advances devoted to controlling the configuration of the plasma have led to the achievement of substantially improved energy and pressure confinement, which reduces the projected cost of electricity from such reactors by a factor of two to a value only about 50% more than the projected cost of electricity from advanced light-water reactors. In addition, progress in the development of advanced, low activation structural materials supports the promise of environmentally benign fusion reactors and research into alternate confinement concepts is yielding the promise of future improvements in confinement. Finally, supporters contend that other potential replacements to the fossil fuels have environmental issues of their own. Solar, wind, and hydroelectric power all have very low surface power density compared to ITER's successor DEMO which, at 2,000 MW, would have an energy density that exceeds even large fission power stations.


title: ITER

text: Safety of the project is regulated according to French and EU nuclear power regulations. In 2011, the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) delivered a favorable opinion, and then, based on the French Act on Nuclear Transparency and Safety, the licensing application was subject to public enquiry that allowed the general public to submit requests for information regarding safety of the project. According to published safety assessments (approved by the ASN), in the worst case of reactor leak, released radioactivity will not exceed 1/1000 of natural background radiation and no evacuation of local residents will be required. The whole installation includes a number of stress tests to confirm efficiency of all barriers. The whole reactor building is built on top of almost 500 seismic suspension columns and the whole complex is located almost 300 m above sea level. Overall, extremely rare events such as 100-year flood of the nearby Durance river and 10,000-year earthquakes were assumed in the safety design of the complex and respective safeguards are part of the design.


title: ITER

text: Between 2008 and 2017, the project has generated 34,000 job-years in the EU economy alone. It is estimated that in the 2018–2030 period, it will generate a further 74,000 job-years and €15.9 billion in gross value.


title: ITER

text: Other planned and proposed fusion reactors include SPARC, DEMO, NIF, HiPER, MAST, SST-2, CFETR, T-15MD and other 'DEMO-phase' national or private-sector fusion power plants.


title: ITER

text: ITER. (2018). "ITER Research Plan within the Staged Approach (Level III – Provisional Version)". ITER.


title: College football national championships in NCAA Division I FBS

text: A national championship in the highest level of college football in the United States, currently the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), is a designation awarded annually by various organizations to their selection of the best college football team. Division I FBS football is the only National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sport for which the NCAA does not sanction a yearly championship event. As such, it is sometimes unofficially referred to as a "mythical national championship".


text: Due to the lack of an official NCAA title, determining the nation's top college football team has often engendered controversy. A championship team is independently declared by multiple individuals and organizations, often referred to as "selectors". These choices are not always unanimous. In 1969 even President of the United States Richard Nixon made a selection by announcing, ahead of the season-ending "game of the century" between No. 1 Texas and No. 2 Arkansas, that the winner would receive a presidential plaque commemorating them as national champions. Texas went on to win, 15–14.


text: While the NCAA has never officially endorsed a championship team, it has documented the choices of some selectors in its official "NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Records" publication. In addition, various analysts have independently published their own choices for each season. These opinions can often diverge with others as well as individual schools' claims to national titles, which may or may not correlate to the selections published elsewhere. Currently, two of the most widely recognized national champion selectors are the Associated Press (AP), which conducts a poll of sportswriters, and the Coaches Poll, a survey of active members of the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA).


text: Since 1992, various consortia of major bowl games have aimed to invite the top two teams at the end of the regular season (as determined by internal rankings, or aggregates of the major polls and other statistics) to compete in what is intended to be the "de facto" national championship game. The current iteration of this practice, the College Football Playoff, selects four teams to participate in national semi-finals hosted by two of six partner bowl games, with their winners advancing to the College Football Playoff National Championship.


text: The concept of a national championship in college football dates to the early years of the sport in the late 19th century, and the earliest contemporaneous polls can be traced to Caspar Whitney, Charles Patterson, and "The Sun" in 1901. Therefore, the concept of polls and national champions predated mathematical ranking systems, but it was Frank Dickinson's math system that was one of the first to be widely popularized. His system named 10–0 Stanford the national champion of 1926, prior to their tie with Alabama in the Rose Bowl. A curious Knute Rockne, then coach of Notre Dame, had Dickinson backdate two seasons, which produced Notre Dame as the 1924 national champion and Dartmouth in 1925.


text: A number of other mathematical systems were born in the 1920s and 1930s and were the only organized methods selecting national champions until the Associated Press began polling sportswriters in 1936 to obtain rankings. Alan J. Gould, the creator of the AP Poll, named Minnesota, Princeton, and SMU co-champions in 1935, and polled writers the following year, which resulted in a national championship for Minnesota. The AP's main competition, United Press, created the first Coaches Poll in 1950. For that year and the next three, the AP and UP agreed on the national champion. The first "split" championship occurred in 1954, when the writers selected Ohio State and the coaches chose UCLA. The two polls also disagreed in 1957, 1965, 1970, 1973, 1974, 1978, 1990, 1991, 1997, and 2003.


text: Though some of the math systems selected champions after the bowl games, both of the major polls released their rankings after the end of the regular season until the AP polled writers after the bowls in 1965, resulting in what was perceived at the time as a better championship selection (Alabama) than UPI's (Michigan State). After 1965, the AP again voted before the bowls for two years, before permanently returning to a post-bowl vote in 1968. The coaches did not conduct a vote after the bowls until 1974, in the wake of awarding their 1973 championship to Alabama, who lost to the AP champion, undefeated Notre Dame, in the Sugar Bowl. The AP and Coaches polls remain the major rankings to this day.


text: From the 1930s to the advent of the College Football Playoff, each top team played a single postseason bowl game per season. The process of selecting a national champion during this period was complicated by the fact that the champions of major conferences were tied to specific bowls (for example, the Big 8 champion was tied to the Orange Bowl), and the top two teams in the nation often played in different bowls. A few bowls over the years featured a #1 vs. #2 matchup; one example was the 1987 Fiesta Bowl, played January 2 following the 1986 season.


text: Two attempts to annually crown a champion on the field were the Bowl Coalition (1992–1994) and Bowl Alliance (1995–1997). However, their effort to host a national championship was hampered by the lack of participation of the Pac-10 and Big Ten champions, who had a contractual obligation to play in the Rose Bowl.


text: The Bowl Championship Series, famous for its use of math, was the successor of the Coalition and Alliance. Besides the many adjustments it underwent during its tenure, including a large overhaul following the 2004 season that included the replacement of the AP Poll with the Harris poll, the BCS remained a mixture of math systems and human polls since its inception in 1998, with the goal of matching the best two teams in the nation in a national championship bowl game which rotated yearly between the Sugar, Fiesta, Rose, and Orange Bowls from 1998 to 2005, and later a standalone game titled the BCS National Championship Game (2006 to 2013). The winner of the BCS Championship Game was awarded the national championship of the Coaches Poll thus winning the AFCA National Championship Trophy. The BCS winner also received the MacArthur Bowl from the National Football Foundation. Neither the AP Poll, nor other current selectors, had contractual obligations to select the BCS champion as their national champion. The BCS resulted in a number of controversies, most notably after the 2003 season, when the BCS championship game did not include eventual AP champion USC, the only time the two championships have diverged since the advent of the BCS. After many seasons of controversy, the BCS was replaced with the College Football Playoff, a Plus-One system aimed at reducing the controversy involved in which teams get to play in a championship game through use of a tournament.


text: Although the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has never bestowed national championships in college football at the topmost level, it does maintain an official records book for the sport. The records book, with consultation from various college football historians, contains a list of "major selectors" of national championships from throughout the history of college football, along with their championship selections.


text: While many people and organizations have named national champions throughout the years, the selectors below are listed in the official NCAA "Football Bowl Subdivision Records" book as being "major selectors" of national championships. The criterion for the NCAA's designation is that the poll or selector be "national in scope, either through distribution in newspaper, television, radio and/or computer online". Former selectors, deemed instrumental in the sport of college football, and selectors that were included for the calculation of the BCS standing, are listed together.


text: The NCAA records book divides its major selectors into three categories: those determined by mathematical formula, human polls, and historical research. The BCS is additionally categorized as a hybrid between math and polls, and the CFP as a playoff system.


text: The mathematical system is the oldest systematic selector of college football national champions. Many of the math selectors were created during the "championship rush" of the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with Frank Dickinson's system, or during the dawn of the computer age in the 1990s. Selectors are listed below with years selected retroactively in "italics".


text: The poll has been the dominant national champion selection method since the inception of the AP Poll in 1936. The National Football Foundation merged its poll with UPI from 1991 to 1992, with "USA Today" from 1993 to 1996, and with the FWAA since 2014.


text: For many years, the national champions of various polls were selected before the annual bowl games were played, by AP (1936–1964 and 1966–1967), Coaches Poll (1950–1973), FWAA (1954), and NFF (1959–1970). In all other latter-day polls, champions were selected after bowl games.


text: During the BCS era, the winner of the BCS Championship Game was automatically awarded the national championship of the Coaches Poll and the National Football Foundation.


text: College football historian Parke H. Davis is the only selector considered by the NCAA to have primarily used research in his selections. Davis published his work in the 1934 edition of "Spalding's Foot Ball Guide", naming retroactive national champions for the years 1869 to 1932 while naming Michigan and Princeton (his alma mater) contemporary co-champions for the 1933 season. In all, he selected 94 teams over 61 seasons as "National Champion Foot Ball Teams". For 21 of these teams (at 12 schools), he was the only major selector to choose them. Their schools use 17 of Davis' singular selections to claim national titles. His work has been criticized for having a heavy Eastern bias, with little regard for the South and the West Coast.


text: The Bowl Championship Series used a mathematical system that combined polls (Coaches and AP/Harris) and multiple computer rankings (including some individual selectors listed above) to determine a season ending matchup between its top two ranked teams in the BCS Championship Game. The champion of that game was contractually awarded the Coaches Poll and National Football Foundation championships.


text: Unlike all selectors prior to 2014, the College Football Playoff does not use math, polls or research to select the participants. Rather, a 13-member committee selects and seeds the teams. The playoff system marked the first time any championship selector arranged a bracket competition to determine whom it would declare to be its champion.


text: Below is a list of the national champions of college football since 1869 chosen by NCAA-designated "major selectors" listed in the official "Football Bowl Subdivision Records" publication.


text: Many teams did not have coaches as late as 1899. The first contemporaneous poll to include teams across the country and selection of a national champions can be traced to Caspar Whitney in 1901. The last retroactive selection in the list is Clyde Berryman's choice of Notre Dame for 1989. The tie was removed from college football in 1995 and the last consensus champion with a tie in its record was Georgia Tech in 1990.


text: A letter next to any season, team, record, coach or selector indicates a footnote that appears at the bottom of the table.


text: The national title count listed below is a culmination of all championship awarded since 1869, regardless of "consensus" or non-consensus status, as listed in the table above according to the selectors deemed to be "major" as listed in the official "NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Records".


text: The totals can be said to be disputed. Individual schools may claim national championships not accounted for by the "NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Records" or may not claim national championship selections that do appear in the official NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Records (see National championship claims by school below).


text: National championship selectors came to be dominated by two competing news agencies in the later half of the 20th century: the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI).


text: These wire services began ranking college football teams in weekly polls, which were then promptly published in the sports sections of each agency's subscribing newspapers across the country. The team ranking No. 1 in each agency's final poll of the season was awarded that agency's national championship.


text: National championships are often popularly considered to be "consensus" when both of these polls are in agreement with their national championship selections, although other selectors exist and do make alternative selections.


text: The AP college football poll has a long history. The news media began running their own polls of sports writers to determine who was, by popular opinion, the best football team in the country at the end of the season. One of the earliest such polls was the AP College Football Poll, first run in 1934 (compiled and organized by Charles Woodroof, former SEC Assistant Director of Media Relations, but not recognized in the official "NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Records") and then continuously from 1936. The first major nationwide poll for ranking college football teams, the Associated Press is probably the most well-known and widely circulated among all of history’s polls. Due to the long-standing historical ties between individual college football conferences and high-paying bowl games like the Rose Bowl and Orange Bowl, the NCAA has never held a tournament or championship game to determine the champion of what is now the highest division, NCAA Division I, Football Bowl Subdivision (the Division I, Football Championship Subdivision and lower divisions do hold championship tournaments). As a result, the public and the media began to take the leading vote-getter in the final AP Poll as the national champion for that season.


text: In the AP Poll's early years, the final poll of sportswriters was taken prior to any bowl games and sometimes even prior to the top teams' final games of the regular season. In 1938, the poll was extended for one week after Notre Dame, No. 1 in the scheduled "final" poll, subsequently lost to rival USC.


text: Following the 1947 season the AP held a special post-bowl poll with only two teams on the ballot, Notre Dame and Michigan, but stated that the result would not supersede that of the final poll conducted following the end of the regular season. The rivals, both unbeaten and untied, had been ranked No. 1 and No. 2 respectively in the final poll. January voters were impressed by Michigan's 49–0 win over common opponent USC in the Rose Bowl and elevated the Wolverines above the Irish in the special post-bowl poll.


text: In 1965 the AP decided to delay the season's final poll until after New Year's Day, citing the proliferation of bowl games and the involvement of eight of the poll's current top ten teams in post-season play. In the next season, 1966, neither of the top two teams were attending bowl games so no post-bowl poll was taken, even after two-time defending AP national champion No. 3 Alabama won the Sugar Bowl and finished the season unbeaten and untied. In 1967 the final poll crowning USC national champion was taken before No. 2 Tennessee or No. 3 Oklahoma had even played their final games of the regular season, and well before those two teams met in the Orange Bowl.


text: In 1968 the final poll was again delayed until after the bowl games so that No. 1 Ohio State could meet No. 2 USC in a "dream match" in the Rose Bowl. Every subsequent season's final AP Poll would be released after the bowl games going forward. The UPI did not follow suit with the Coaches Poll until the 1974 season.


text: Until the 1968 NCAA University Division football season, the final AP Poll of the season was released following the end of the regular season, with the exception of the 1965 season. In 1964, Alabama was named the national champion in the final AP Poll following the completion of the regular season, but lost in the Orange Bowl to Texas, leaving Arkansas as the only undefeated, untied team after the Razorbacks defeated Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl Classic. In 1965, the AP's decision to wait to crown its champion paid off, as top-ranked Michigan State lost to UCLA in the Rose Bowl, number two Arkansas lost to LSU in the Cotton Bowl Classic, and fourth-ranked Alabama defeated third-ranked Nebraska in the Orange Bowl, vaulting the Crimson Tide to the top of the AP's final poll. Michigan State was named national champion in the final United Press International poll of coaches, which did not conduct a post-bowl poll.


text: The AP Poll was used as a component of the Bowl Championship Series computer ranking formula starting in 1998, but without any formal agreement in place like the contract made between the BCS and the Coaches Poll. For the 2003 season the AP Poll caused a split national title and BCS controversy when it awarded its national championship to No. 1 USC instead of BCS champion LSU. In December 2004 the AP opted out of the BCS formula, requesting that the BCS "discontinue its unauthorized use of the AP poll as a component of BCS rankings", in response to three AP voters from Texas elevating Texas above California into the Rose Bowl in the last regular season AP Poll.


text: News agency United Press (UP), the main competitor to the Associated Press, began conducting its own college football ratings during the 1950 season. The wire service came to be known as United Press International (UPI) following a merger with International News Service in 1958.


text: The weekly ranking was a joint polling effort between the news agency and the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA), with UP/UPI sports writers gathering and tabulating the coaches' votes and publishing the results in newspapers across the nation.


text: The UP/UPI rankings were originally conducted by polling 35 of the nation's college football coaches. The coaches were chosen to represent every major football conference, with 5 coaches from each of 7 regions, in an apparent effort to combat the perceived East Coast bias of the rival AP Poll's constituent sports writers.


text: Each season's final Coaches Poll was initially published following the regular season and did not take bowl game results into account; the UP/UPI national champion lost its bowl game 8 times between 1950 and 1973. Since the 1974 season the poll has awarded its national championship following the postseason bowls. That same year the AFCA voted to thereafter not rank any team currently under NCAA or conference-sanctioned probation.


text: Following the decline of UPI in the 1980s, the AFCA ended their 42-year relationship with the wire service in 1991. The Coaches Poll continued, with new sponsorship and distribution partners, as the USA Today/CNN poll (1991–1996), USA Today/ESPN poll (1997–2004), USA Today poll (2005–2014), and USA Today/Amway poll (2014–present).


text: The Bowl Championship Series included the Coaches Poll as a major factor in its ranking formula. In return, voting AFCA members were contractually obligated to award their Coaches Poll national championship selections to the winner of the BCS National Championship Game. Lacking its own dedicated trophy, the BCS champion was awarded The Coaches' Trophy on the field immediately following the game.


text: The following table contains the national championships that have been recognized by the final AP or Coaches Poll. Originally both the AP and Coaches poll champions were crowned after the regular season, but since 1968 and 1974 respectively, both polls crown their champions after the bowl games are completed (with the exception of the 1965 season). The BCS champion was automatically awarded the Coaches Poll championship. Of the current 120+ Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS, formerly Division I-A) schools, only 30 have won at least a share of a national title by the AP or Coaches poll. Of these 30 teams, only 20 teams have won multiple titles. Of the 20 teams, only 7 have won five or more national titles: Alabama, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, USC, Miami (FL), Nebraska, and Ohio State. The years listed in the table below indicate a national championship selection by the AP or Coaches Poll. The selections are noted with (AP) or (Coaches) when a national champion selection differed between the two polls for that particular season, which has occurred in twelve different seasons (including 2004, for which the coaches selection was rescinded) since the polls first came to coexist in 1950.


text: The AP Poll and Coaches Poll have picked different final national poll leaders at the end of 11 different seasons since their first concurrent polls in 1950. This situation is referred to as a "split" national championship.


text: College football fans and administrators have long sought to match the No. 1 vs. No. 2 teams in an end-of-season national championship game to determine an undisputed national champion on the gridiron.


text: Throughout most of the 20th century, bowl game conference tie-ins made it impossible to automatically schedule the two top teams for a single post-season game.


text: Through luck and fortuitous scheduling, a "national championship game" was occasionally able to settle the matter on the field.


text: Following back-to-back years of split AP and Coaches Poll national champions in 1990: Colorado (AP), Georgia Tech (Coaches); and 1991: Miami (FL) (AP), Washington (Coaches), the Bowl Coalition was formed in 1992 to increase the probability of a No. 1 vs. No. 2 national championship game matchup in one of the Coalition's participating bowls.


text: The Coalition's rules retained traditional bowl game conference tie-ins but provided some flexibility for scheduling a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup between two teams selected from among the champions of the ACC, Big East, Big Eight, SEC, and SWC conferences, or independent Notre Dame, in the Cotton Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl, or Sugar Bowl.


text: The Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences were notably not members of the Bowl Coalition, with their champions retaining their traditional and contractual matchup in the Rose Bowl. Likewise, mid-major teams had no route to the Bowl Coalition National Championship Game.


text: In 1995 the Bowl Alliance replaced the Bowl Coalition. Going further than the Coalition, the Alliance guaranteed a postseason matchup of the No. 1 and No. 2 ranked teams of its same five conference champions plus Notre Dame. Beginning in 1996, the Big 12 champion joined the Alliance in place of the champions of the disbanded Big Eight and Southwest conferences.


text: Unlike the Coalition, the Alliance eliminated traditional conference tie-ins to its associated bowls. The Bowl Alliance national championship game would be rotated amongst the Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Orange Bowl, with the Cotton Bowl dropped from the slate. The Bowl Alliance also awarded its own trophy to the winner of its national championship game.


text: The Rose Bowl remained independent of the Alliance, leaving open the possibility of a national title going to the Big Ten or Pac-10 Rose Bowl champion rather than the Alliance's champion. This occurred in 1997, when No. 1 Michigan won the Rose Bowl and retained their top ranking in the AP Poll. The Bowl Alliance National Championship Game winner Nebraska split the championship when they passed Michigan in the final Coaches Poll (a result denied by the Coaches Poll to Penn State three years earlier in the same situation).


text: The Bowl Championship Series (BCS), starting in 1998, finally succeeded in bringing the Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences together with the former Coalition and Alliance members for a combined national championship game.


text: Following the regular season, the BCS paired its No. 1 and No. 2 ranked teams to play for the title in the BCS National Championship Game. This designation initially rotated in order between four BCS Bowls: the Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, and Rose Bowl. For the 2006 season onward the BCS National Championship Game became its own separate contest, played one week later at the site of the bowl in the same rotation.


text: The BCS formula varied over the years, with the final version relying on a combination of the Coaches and Harris polls and an average of various computer rankings to determine relative team rankings.


text: The winners of the BCS National Championship Game were crowned the Coaches Poll national champions and were awarded the Coaches' Trophy on the field following the game. They were also awarded the MacArthur Bowl by the National Football Foundation.


text: † USC's victory in the 2005 Orange Bowl and subsequent 2004–05 BCS National Championship was vacated by the BCS.


text: The College Football Playoff (CFP) was designed as a replacement for the BCS. While the NCAA still does not officially sanction the event, organizers sought to bring a playoff system similar to all other levels of NCAA football to the Football Bowl Subdivision.


text: The College Football Playoff relies on a 13-member selection committee to choose the top four teams to play in a two-round single-elimination playoff bracket. The winner of the final game is awarded the College Football Playoff National Championship Trophy.


text: The following tables list schools' known national championship claims at the highest level of play in college football. Some of these schools no longer compete at the highest level, which is currently NCAA Division I FBS, but nonetheless maintain claims to titles from when they did compete at the highest level.


text: Because there is no one governing or official body that regulates, recognizes, or awards national championships in college football, and because many independent selectors of championships exist, many of the claims by the schools listed below are shared, contradict each other, or are controversial.


text: In addition, because there is no one body overseeing national championships, no standardized requirements exist in order for a school to make a claim on a national championship, as any particular institution is free to make any declaration it deems to be fit. The majority of these claims, but not all, are based on championships awarded from selectors listed as "major" in the official "NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Records". Not all championships awarded by third party selectors, nor those listed in the official NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Records, are necessarily claimed by each school. Therefore, these claims represent how each individual school sees their own history on the subject of national championships. For the pre-poll era from 1901 through 1935, 41 major selections of teams from 20 schools have not been used to make national title claims.


text: The tables below include only national championship claims originating from each particular school and therefore represent the point-of-view of each individual institution. Each total number of championships, and the years for which they are claimed, are documented by the particular school on its official website, in its football media guide, on a prominent stadium sign, or in other official publications or literature (see Source). If a championship is not mentioned by a school for any particular season, regardless of whether it was awarded by a selector or listed in a third-party publication such as the official NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Records, it is not considered to be claimed by that institution.


text: In addition to the NCAA-designated "major selectors" listed above, various other people and organizations have selected national champions in college football. Selections from such notable selectors are listed below.


text: Teams in the following table were selected by notable national championship selectors not listed as a "major selector "in the NCAA "Football Bowl Subdivision Records" book.


text: In the interest of brevity, this table contains only teams that were "not" also selected by any NCAA-designated major selector for the given year.


title: Linda Fiorentino

text: Clorinda "Linda" Fiorentino (born March 9, 1958 or 1960) is an American former actress. Fiorentino made her screen debut with a leading role in the 1985 coming-of-age drama film "Vision Quest", followed that same year with a lead role in the action film "Gotcha!" and an appearance in the film "After Hours".