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News of Jan
4, 2007
Russia will help build
World's First Thermonuclear Reactor
Moscow,
Jan 4
A total of 13 billion euros will be spent on building the world's
first International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) with
help from several countries including India. The "small Sun", as the
reactor is referred to, will be sited at Cadarache near Marseilles
in France. Russia will finance part of the project and contribute
its technologies and know-how. Russia, South Korea, China, Japan,
India, the European Union and the US signed an agreement in November
to set up the reactor.
Unlike conventional nuclear power plant reactors utilizing the
nuclear radioactive decay principle, that is, fission of heavy
elements, the ITER unit generates power through thermonuclear
fusion, particularly when two light atomic nuclei fuse together to
form heavier ones.
Scientists want to imitate physical processes inside the Sun and to
use them for building commercial power units.
Chemically inert helium is created through the fusion of hydrogen
isotopes -deuterium and tritium - inside the Sun. This unique
process generates hundreds of times more energy than uranium-powered
nuclear reactors.
The earth has a virtually unlimited amount of fuel for future
thermonuclear reactors. Both deuterium and tritium can be obtained
from water. This process is much simpler, safer and cheaper than the
conventional nuclear fuel cycle.
Moreover, "clean" thermonuclear reactors will not damage the
environment even in case of major accidents and can therefore be
built in densely populated areas.
The principles of thermonuclear fusion were formulated over 50 years
ago.
However, scientists faced enormous problems as they tried to ignite
and control thermonuclear plasma.
Lev Artsimovich, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said
thermonuclear fusion had become the most formidable science and
engineering
challenge of the 20th century.
But at that time scientists failed to build a thermonuclear reactor,
and interest in this problem gradually began to wane after a period
of unsuccessful attempts.
In the last decade, works on this problem have resumed all over the
world and international cooperation in this sphere has grown
stronger because it is very important to harness controlled
thermonuclear fusion.
Work on the first experimental TOKAMAK (Toroidal Chamber in Magnetic
Coils) reactor began in 1988 on the erstwhile Soviet Union's
initiative.
The reactor's basic principle of operation is as follows.
A powerful electric current flows through toroidal-chamber plasma,
and its magnetic field merges with that of the toroidal solenoid to
create the required magnetic field needed to maintain a
well-balanced and insulated plasma configuration.
The Soviet Union and later Russia, the US, the EU and Japan
established an agency that promptly designed the TOKAMAK reactor.
This project largely owed its success to Russian research involving
pre-nuclear TOKAMAK reactors, which studied related problems and
were used to test different engineering solutions, namely,
large-scale superconducting magnetic systems and powerful
high-frequency units for creating and maintaining stable reactor
plasma.
Russia's Federal Nuclear Power Agency (Rosatom) is proud to say that
Russian scientists were the first to develop TOKAMAK systems for the
ITER project.
The Cadarache reactor is expected to prove that thermonuclear power
plants are feasible. If successful, it will serve as a basis for
more powerful and advanced units for completely solving mankind's
energy problems. However, this goal cannot be achieved overnight.
(Yury Zaitsev is an expert at the
Russian Academy of Engineering Sciences).
-RIA Novosti
News of Jan
4, 2007
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