ITER: The Machine
ITER Organization
Technical documentation from the ITER Organization on the tokamak under construction in France: superconducting magnets, vacuum vessel, breeding blanket, divertor, cryostat and assembly sequence, with component specifications, manufacturing detail and project status. Grounds the abstract fusion challenge in a real machine: the blanket, divertor heat flux and magnet system pages show concretely why confinement is hard, which no textbook chapter conveys as vividly. Included as primary-source engineering documentation, not as a view on whether fusion will succeed - schedule and milestone claims here are self-reported and should be read as such.
More resources on Nuclear Energy & Fusion
Illinois EnergyProf (David Ruzic)
Video lectures by University of Illinois nuclear and plasma engineering professor David Ruzic covering reactor operation, the uranium supply chain, Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear waste, small modular reactors and fusion progress, worked through with quantitative estimates. The strongest free video source that treats contested questions - waste, Chernobyl and Fukushima, SMR economics, fusion timelines - with a working professor doing the arithmetic on a whiteboard instead of asserting a position.
The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World
MIT Energy Initiative interdisciplinary study (2018) on why new nuclear construction costs so much and what would change that, covering cost drivers, advanced reactor designs, plant siting and construction methods, waste, and policy options across several countries. The best free, numbers-first treatment of the economics and policy half of the topic, which the engineering textbooks skip. It is neither anti-nuclear nor promotional: its central finding is that nuclear's problem is construction cost and project delivery, and it says so with cost data rather than advocacy.
Introduction to Nuclear Engineering (4th Edition)
The canonical one-book answer for reactor physics: if you want to actually compute criticality, flux distributions and reactor kinetics rather than read about them, this is what nearly every NE department assigns. Requires differential equations, hence advanced. The standard junior/senior nuclear engineering survey text, covering atomic and nuclear physics, neutron diffusion and moderation, reactor theory and kinetics, heat removal, radiation protection, fuel cycles, waste disposal and reactor licensing. The fourth edition updates plant designs and data.