the zooming hydrogen will rotate faster than the speed of sound , twisting like a strand of dna as it circulates .
the report is so damning , science has learned , that after a 13 february special session that reviewed and accepted the report 's conclusions and recommendations , the iter council — the project 's governing body — restricted its readership to a small number of senior managers and council members .
iter leaders fear that the damning assessment , combined with expected delays , could cause backers to pull their funding .
for the full story , see this week 's issue of science .
the machine ’s creators , this process — sparking and controlling a self - sustaining synthetic star — will stand a hundred feet tall , and it will weigh twenty - three thousand tons — more than twice the weight of the eiffel tower .
caught in the grip of their titanic forces , the artificial earthbound sun will be suspended , under tremendous pressure , in the pristine nothingness of iter ’s vacuum interior .
there is n’t a physical substance that could contain such a thing .
metals , plastics , ceramics , concrete , even pure diamond — all would be obliterated on contact , and so the machine will hold the superheated cloud in a “ magnetic bottle , ” using the largest system of superconducting magnets in the world .
like the sun , the cloud will go nuclear .