Posted for Emiliano Feresin
Italy and Russia plan to build up a new nuclear fusion experiment called IGNITOR, according to an intra-governmental memorandum signed on Monday in Milan, Italy. Italian plasma physicist Bruno Coppi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, together with the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (ENEA) will collaborate with Evgeny Velikhov, president of the Curchatov Atomic Energy Institute of Moscow to finalize plans for the machine, which will be built at the Triniti site at Troitsk near Moscow.
Nuclear fusion involves squeezing together two nuclei of low mass, usually deuterium and tritium, to release energy. Current fusion experiments, like the giant international project ITER, involve the use of a tokamak, a torus-shaped reactor that magnetically confines fusion reactants in a super-heated plasma.
IGNITOR’s design differs from ITER’s in having a smaller tokamak weighing around 700 tonnes with a radius of 1.3 meters versus ITER’s 19,000 tonnes weight and 6.2 meter radius. Unlike ITER, IGNITOR aims to demonstrate the feasibility of plasma ignition, a self-sustaining plasma state where there is enough fusion power to maintain the reaction without external heating. ITER, on the other hand, will aim to demonstrate that it can generate more power than needs to be put in to spark fusion.
Coppi conceived the idea of the IGNITOR reactor back in the 1970s, while working on high density plasma experiments created with high-magnetic fields in machines such as MIT’s ALCATOR . Since then he and a small group of collaborators in the United States and Italy have developed the project on paper and built the first prototype parts, supported by the Italian government. Coppi’s long battle to bring the project into being collided with plans to fund ITER. But he believes that his experiment is the only one capable of reaching ignition by the magnetic field confinement approach.
The IGNITOR programme has till now cost Italy around €20 million. According to a 2003 ENEA estimate, additional € 226 million will be needed to build IGNITOR.
Image: The IGNITOR tokamac / ENEA