India's Plasma Institute Builds $140 Million, High-Vacuum Cold Storage Vessel for Thermonuclear Project

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Written by Richard Finlayson, Senior International Editor for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--India's high-end, high-tech engineering capabilities have received international recognition in the form of a contract to manufacture the world's largest cryostat, high-vacuum cold storage vessel for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project in Cadarache, France.

The $140 million vessel will be manufactured in segments at India's Institute of Plasma Research (IPR) in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, and then shipped to France for assembly at the project site. The procurement agreement has been signed by the IPR.

ITER-India, a part of the IPR that is an autonomous unit of the country's department of atomic energy, will make the cryostat segments as part of India's share in the project as a member of a seven-nation consortium. The other consortium members are China, the European Union (EU), Japan, Korea, Russia and the U.S., who are sharing in the design, installation and creation of the international project structure and project funding.

Shishir Deshpande, the project director of ITER-India said that the cryostat was crucial to the ITER experiment, as it would house the fusion reactor in its entirety, including support to all internal systems. Strong coordination within the consortium has produced the successful fabrication of more than 1 million parts for the ITER Tokomak.

The ITER Tokomak will be nearly 30 meters tall and will weigh 23,000 tons. A tokomak is a device that creates a stable plasma equilibrium for the production of controlled thermonuclear power. The ITER Tokomak is designed to produce 500 megawatts (MW) of electrical power output from a power input of 50 MW.

IPR is internationally recognized for its contributions to fundamental and applied research in plasma physics and associated technologies. It possesses core competency in theoretical plasma physics, computer modeling, superconductor magnets and cyrogenics, ultra-high vacuum, pulsed power, microwave and radio frequency, computer-based control and data acquisition and industrial, environmental and strategic plasma applications. It has built a number of steady-state tokomaks over a period of two decades. For related information, see April 20, 2010, article - Consortium Awarded Architect-Engineering Contract for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in France.

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