Indian works on track for world’s first fusion reactor

India, one of the seven participating countries, is keeping pace with the development work assigned to it as part of the joint project to produce energy from fusion, using deuterium and tritium, the two hydrogen isotopes, as fuel at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), said project director of India-ITER Shishir Deshpande.

The reactor is expected to be ready by 2022 while 500MW power generation could take another decade. India was the last to join the experiment, the first of its kind effort, on the initiative of Anil Kakodkar, former Atomic Energy Commission chairman. Deshpande, from the Institute of Plasma Research, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, is ensuring that Indian scientists and industry deliver their work on time. The entire project is expected to cost about 13 billion Euro.

Speaking to TOI on the ambitious project, Deshpande said designing work on ‘cryostat’, the world’s largest high vacuum cold storage vessel for the reactor, which India is making, has already been completed and procurement process has started. Deshpande, a Nagpur University (NU) alumnus from the physics department, was speaking to TOI while in the city to deliver the VN Thatte memorial lecture at Institute of Science on Thursday and NU physics department.

The ITER project coming up at Cadarache, France, would house a fusion reactor as big as a ten-storeyed building. It will try to fuse together two atoms as against fission, where atoms divide to create energy. The Tokamak, a device that houses the magnetic fields to contain the plasma (fourth state of matter similar to that present in the Sun) will also be one of the biggest and best Tokamaks.

“We are basically involved in designing and fabricating 7-8 major components of the reactor and developing certain diagnostic tools. India would begin delivering them by 2016. The work on other components are in prototyping or designing stage,” said Deshpande.

Though the pre-project work on ITER began in 2005, the seven participating countries; European Union (EU), Russia, USA, China, Japan, South Korea and India, actually signed a joint agreement in November 2006, and a body called as ITER organization was formally constituted in 2007. The Indian government formally cleared the project and formed a special board in 2007. The construction work of the first building was started in 2010.

EU is contributing the biggest share (45%) in the project, which is expected to cost over 13-15 billion Euro (about Rs 78,000 crore) while the other six partners are contributing about 9% each, mostly in kind. Professor Osamu Motojima from Japan is the project’s director general.

Besides cryostat and cryoline, India is also making the neutron shielding plates made of borated steel, a diagnostic neutron beam, 20MW heating power system of heating plasma ions, cooling, water and heat rejection systems, power supply system, electron heating system and some diagnostic tools.

Times of India