We were born to make a fairy tale come true
The metropolitan plasma physicists have finally received an installation on which they will be able to study thermonuclear reactions, bringing humanity closer to mastering a source of cheap (if not free) electrical energy. On Tuesday, the National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute” hosted a solemn ceremony of launching the T-15MD thermonuclear installation (tokamak). The institute, in which the world’s first tokamak was created in 1956, was able to restart a new installation after 20 years of inactivity!
Recall that the main goal of thermonuclear fusion is to force the reactor to hold plasma with certain parameters longer, so that it becomes self-sustaining to generate the required amount of energy.
Tokamak T-15MD (toroidal chamber with magnetic coils) is a modification of the T-15 reactor that has been operating at the Kurchatov Institute since the late 1980s. It was planned to launch a few years earlier, but this happened only on May 18, 2021.
Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin was present at the launch of the T-15MD. SIC President Mikhail Kovalchuk presented the installation as the most powerful in Russia and unparalleled abroad.
Yes, it is more powerful than all existing Russian tokamaks, as Kovalchuk said, but not in terms of the strength of the magnetic field. As for its plasma current (the flow of electric current through the plasma), here the design parameters are indeed greater than on other Russian tokamaks. They are 600-700 kiloamperes per hour (for comparison, before the T-15MD the Globus M2 was in the lead at the Ioffe Institute with 300-350 kiloamperes).
Kovalchuk also called the tokamak hybrid. However, as experts in thermonuclear fusion explained to MK, it is difficult to call it truly hybrid. “A hybrid is a reactor that simultaneously uses plasma and the fission reaction of radioactive isotopes, as in conventional nuclear power plants,” one of the experts explained to us. – There are no such reactors anywhere yet. What was shown to us at the Kurchatov Institute can rather be called a prototype of the source of thermonuclear neutrons for the future hybrid reactor. “
“The uniqueness of the new unit is the combination of high power with compact dimensions, which has become possible thanks to a number of new technologies,” the president of the institute said at the ceremony.
In fact, the plasma discharge can “live” in this tokamak for no more than a few seconds, while in foreign samples this figure reaches 100 and 1000 seconds. “This, however, happens in tokamaks with more efficient superconducting windings,” explains my interlocutor. – By the way, our T-15 model of the 80s was also with superconducting windings, but then it turned out to be expensive for us, and the work stopped. We didn’t pull the superconductors themselves, but the liquid helium factory, which is needed to cool them ”. The modernized tokamak also ended up without superconductors. But its advantage can be considered a modified cross-sectional shape compared to the T-15, which gives some advantages.
If we compare the T-15MD with existing Western models, experts call D3D in the USA or Asdex in Germany.
But what did Mikhail Kovalchuk mean when he called the reactor “unique”?
“Perhaps we are talking about a higher relative pressure in the plasma, – says my interlocutor. “And this, in turn, can affect the effectiveness of its retention.”
In any case, for Russia, and for Moscow in particular, this setting is important and necessary. Since our country is entering into cooperation on the creation of a large international thermonuclear reactor ITER (it is being built in France), it should have its own reactor of this type for developing technologies.
Newspaper headline:
We were born to make plasma come true
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