C Shivakumar
Chennai:
India is providing cryostat technology to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, an international project to push the limits of fusion energy, according to R Chidambaram, principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India.
He said Cryostat allows passive removal of decay heat of vacuum vessel and in-vessel components by gas conduction and convection.
Considered to be one of the most important and critical systems in the ITER project, Cryostat envelops the entire basic systems of the reactor based on the ‘tokomak’ concept of magnetic confinement, in which the plasma is contained in a doughnut-shaped vacuum vessel.
The fuel—a mixture of Deuterium and Tritium, two isotopes of Hydrogen—is heated to temperatures in excess of 150 million celsius, forming a hot plasma. Strong magnetic fields are used to keep the plasma away from the walls; these are produced by superconducting coils surrounding the vessel, and by an electrical current driven through the plasma
India has contributed $25 million hi-tech equipment for ITER, including thousand super conducting sextuple magnets, he added.
Constructed in Europe, at Cadarache in the south of France, the reactor will be 30 times more powerful than the Joint European Torus (JET) which is currently the largest comparable experiment operating in the world.
The object of ITER is to produce a sustained fusion reaction, one that generates 500 megawatts for up to 1000 seconds. In comparison, the last major international fusion project, the Joint European Torus, produced about 16 megawatts of power for less than a second. ITER will allow scientists and engineers to develop the knowledge and technologies needed to proceed to a next phase of electricity production through fusion power stations
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