Thermonuclear reactors in the world. The first thermonuclear reactor

Today many countries take part in thermonuclear research. Leaders are the European Union, the United States, Russia and Japan, and the programs of China, Brazil, Canada and Korea are growing rapidly. Originally thermonuclear reactors in the United States and the USSR were associated with the development of nuclear weapons and remained classified until the conference "Atoms for Peace", which was held in Geneva in 1958. After the creation of the Soviet tokamak, nuclear fusion research in the 1970s became a "big science". But the cost and complexity of the devices increased to the point where international cooperation was the only opportunity to move forward.

Thermonuclear reactors in the world

Since the 1970s, the commencement of the commercial use of fusion energy has been constantly pushed back for 40 years. However, in recent years, much has happened, thanks to which this period can be reduced.

Several tokamaks have been built, including the European JET, the British MAST and the experimental TFTR thermonuclear reactor in Princeton, USA. The international ITER project is currently under construction in Cadarache, France. It will become the largest tokamak when it will work in 2020. In 2030, China will be built CFETR, which will surpass ITER. In the meantime, the PRC is conducting research on the experimental superconducting tokamak EAST.

Thermonuclear reactors of another type - stellarators - are also popular with researchers. One of the largest, LHD, began work at the Japanese National Institute of Thermonuclear Fusion in 1998. It is used to find the best magnetic configuration of plasma confinement. The German Max Planck Institute conducted research on the Wendelstein 7-AS reactor in Garching between 1988 and 2002, and at present on the Wendelstein 7-X, which lasted more than 19 years. Another TJII stellarator is operated in Madrid, Spain. In the US, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), where the first thermonuclear reactor of this type was built in 1951, in 2008 stopped the construction of NCSX due to cost overruns and lack of funding.

In addition, significant progress has been achieved in studies of inertial thermonuclear fusion. The $ 7 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration, was completed in March 2009. The French Laser Mégajoule (LMJ) began operations in October 2014. Thermonuclear reactors use about 2 million joules of light energy delivered by lasers for several billionths of a second to a target of several millimeters in size to trigger a nuclear fusion reaction. The main task of NIF and LMJ is to support national military nuclear programs.

ITER

In 1985, the Soviet Union proposed building a next-generation tokamak together with Europe, Japan and the United States. The work was conducted under the auspices of the IAEA. In the period from 1988 to 1990, the first projects of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor ITER were created, which also means a "path" or "journey" to Latin, in order to prove that synthesis can produce more energy than absorb. Canada and Kazakhstan also took part with the mediation of Euratom and Russia, respectively.

After 6 years, the ITER Board approved the first complex reactor design based on established physics and technology worth $ 6 billion. Then the US withdrew from the consortium, which forced to cut costs by half and change the project. The result was ITER-FEAT worth $ 3 billion, but allowing you to achieve a self-sustaining reaction and a positive balance of power.

In 2003, the US again joined the consortium, and China announced its desire to participate in it. As a result, in the middle of 2005, the partners agreed on the construction of ITER in Cadarache in the south of France. The EU and France contributed half of the 12.8 billion euros, and Japan, China, South Korea, the United States and Russia - 10% each. Japan provided high-tech components, contained an IFMIF installation worth 1 billion euros for material testing, and was entitled to build the next test reactor. The total cost of ITER includes half the cost of 10-year construction and half - for 20 years of operation. India became the seventh member of ITER at the end of 2005.

The experiments should begin in 2018 using hydrogen to avoid the activation of magnets. The use of DT plasma is not expected before 2026.

The goal of ITER is to generate 500 MW (at least for 400 s), using less than 50 MW of input power without generating electricity.

Demogo's two-kilowatt demonstration power plant will produce large-scale electricity production on an ongoing basis. The conceptual design of Demo will be completed by 2017, and its construction will begin in 2024. The launch will take place in 2033.

JET

In 1978 the EU (Euratom, Sweden and Switzerland) launched a joint European project JET in the UK. JET today is the largest working tokamak in the world. A similar reactor JT-60 operates at the Japanese National Institute of Thermonuclear Fusion, but only JET can use deuterium-tritium fuel.

The reactor was launched in 1983 and was the first experiment that resulted in a controlled thermonuclear synthesis in November 1991 with a capacity of up to 16 MW for one second and 5 MW of stable power on a deuterium-tritium plasma. A lot of experiments were carried out to study various heating schemes and other techniques.

Further improvements to JET relate to increasing its power. The compact MAST reactor is being developed with JET and is part of the ITER project.

K-STAR

K-STAR is the Korean superconducting tokamak of the National Institute of Thermonuclear Research (NFRI) in Daejeon, which produced its first plasma in mid-2008. This is a pilot project of ITER, which is the result of international cooperation. A 1.8 m tokamak with a radius of 1.8 m is the first reactor using superconducting Nb3Sn magnets, the same ones that are planned to be used in ITER. During the first stage, which was completed by 2012, K-STAR had to prove the viability of basic technologies and achieve plasma pulses of up to 20 seconds. At the second stage (2013-2017), it is upgraded to study long pulses of up to 300 s in H mode and transition to a high-performance AT-mode. The goal of the third phase (2018-2023) is to achieve high performance and efficiency in the long pulse mode. At the 4th stage (2023-2025), DEMO technologies will be tested. The device is not capable of working with tritium and DT does not use fuel.

K-DEMO

Developed in cooperation with the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the South Korean Institute of NFRI, K-DEMO should be the next step in the development of commercial reactors after ITER, and will be the first power plant capable of generating power to the electrical grid, namely 1 million kW in a few weeks. Its diameter is 6.65 m, and it will have a reproductive zone module created within the framework of the DEMO project. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Korea plans to invest in it about a trillion Korean won ($ 941 million).

EAST

The Chinese experimental advanced superconducting tokamak (EAST) at the Institute of Chinese Physics in Hefei created a hydrogen plasma with a temperature of 50 million ° C and held it for 102 seconds.

TFTR

At the US PPPL laboratory, the experimental TFTR thermonuclear reactor operated from 1982 to 1997. In December 1993 TFTR became the first magnetic tokamak on which extensive experiments with deuterium-tritium plasma were made. The following year, the reactor produced a record 10.7 MW of controlled power at that time, and in 1995 a record was reached of the temperature of ionized gas at 510 million ° C. However, the installation did not achieve the goal of break-even energy of thermonuclear fusion, but successfully fulfilled the objectives of hardware design, making a significant contribution to the development of ITER.

LHD

LHD at the Japanese National Institute of Thermonuclear Fusion in Toki, Gifu Prefecture, was the largest stellarator in the world. The launch of the thermonuclear reactor took place in 1998, and it demonstrated plasma confinement qualities comparable to other large installations. The ion temperature was 13.5 keV (about 160 million ° C) and the energy was 1.44 MJ.

Wendelstein 7-X

After a year of testing, which began at the end of 2015, the temperature of helium for a short time reached 1 million ° C. In 2016, a thermonuclear reactor with hydrogen plasma, using 2 MW of power, reached a temperature of 80 million ° C for a quarter of a second. W7-X is the largest stellarator in the world and it is planned its continuous operation within 30 minutes. The cost of the reactor was 1 billion €.

NIF

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was completed in March 2009. Using its 192 laser beams, NIF is able to concentrate 60 times more energy than any previous laser system.

Cold nuclear fusion

In March 1989, two researchers, American Stanley Pons and Briton Martin Fleischman, said they had launched a simple desktop cold fusion reactor operating at room temperature. The process consisted of electrolysis of heavy water using palladium electrodes on which deuterium nuclei were concentrated at high density. The researchers claim that heat was produced, which could only be explained from the point of view of nuclear processes, and there were by-products of synthesis, including helium, tritium and neutrons. However, other experimenters failed to repeat this experiment. Most of the scientific community does not believe that cold fusion reactors are real.

Low-energy nuclear reactions

Initiated by claims for "cold fusion", research has continued in the field of low-energy nuclear reactions, which have some empirical support, but not a generally accepted scientific explanation. Apparently, weak nuclear interactions (rather than a powerful force, as in fission of nuclei or their synthesis) are used to create and capture neutrons. Experiments include the penetration of hydrogen or deuterium through the catalytic bed and reaction with the metal. Researchers report the observed release of energy. The main practical example is the interaction of hydrogen with nickel powder with the release of heat, the amount of which is greater than any chemical reaction can give.