St. Petersburg. Russia sent one of the six giant magnets needed for the ITER nuclear fusion program in France, one of the last international scientific projects in which Moscow participates, despite the conflict with Ukraine.
The ship carrying the Russian-made magnet, or “poloidal field coil,” left St. Petersburg on Tuesday under gray skies.
On board, the huge 9-meter-wide coil, weighing 200 tons, had been well-wrapped to withstand a two-week voyage to Marseille in the south of France.
The ring-shaped magnet, built under the supervision of the Russian atomic agency Rosatom, will form the top of the world’s largest “tokamak”.
The tokamak is a magnetic fusion device built in France following the principle that powers the Sun and the stars.
The Russian piece was intended to leave in May, but sanctions that prohibited Russian ships from docking in Europe delayed the departure.
Still, “the current situation does not change the fact that we will fulfill our obligations,” said Viacheslav Perchukov, Rosatom’s representative for international projects.
Geopolitical tensions “practically did not affect the completion of the project,” he added.
“Without (the Russian coil), the tokamak will not work,” Leonid Khimchenko, principal scientist at the ITER center, told AFP.
He praised a “unique” achievement of more than eight years of preparation.
In the south of France, 35 nations are collaborating to build the world’s largest nuclear fusion device.
“This is such an interesting project that, in fact, we are all one family… there is no competition between us, nothing,” Khimchenko added.
The project was launched after a 1985 summit between US President Ronald Reagan and Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Andrey Mednikov, the scientist in charge of the production of the poloidal field coil, praised the continuing international cooperation.
“If this cooperation were to stop, everyone would lose: both Russia and the international community,” Mednikov said.
The ITER complex in the south of France is supported by a consortium of world governments, including member states of the European Union, the United States, China and Russia.
It is expected to be the last step in showing that nuclear fusion can become a reliable energy source in the second half of this century.
This has advantages, since operating the fusion-based power plants of the future would not produce greenhouse gases and, in addition, it generates very small amounts of short-lived radioactive waste.
Fusion works on the principle that energy can be released by forcing atomic nuclei together rather than splitting them apart, as in the fission reactions that power existing nuclear power plants.
In the core of the Sun, enormous gravitational pressures allow this to happen at temperatures of around 10 million degrees Celsius.
At pressures much lower than is possible to recreate on Earth, the temperatures to produce fusion must be much higher, above 100 million degrees Celsius.
There are no materials that can withstand direct contact with such heat.
So to achieve fusion in a lab, scientists have devised a solution in which a superheated gas, or plasma, is held within a doughnut-shaped magnetic field.
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