New Delhi: India will sign a formal agreement to join the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) on May 24 in Brussels, according to Dr. Predhiman Krishan Kaw, director of the Department of Atomic Energy's Institute for Plasma Research (IPR) at Gandhinagar in Gujarat.

DAE secretary Anil Kakodkar will sign the agreement. It would take about six months to operationalise the agreement, Dr. Kaw said, while addressing the Indo-French Lectures on Nuclear Fusion held on April 21. Dr. Kakodkar and Dr. Jean Jacquinot, Adviser to the French High Commissioner for Atomic Energy, also spoke.

IPR will be the nodal institution in India's participation in ITER, a global effort to harness energy from nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun and other stars. The ITER consortium comprises seven members - E.U., Russia, U.S., Japan, Korea, China and India. India was admitted as a full member on December 6, 2005 and is the latest entrant to the group.

According to Dr. Kakodkar, the first initiative to get India admitted into ITER came from France.

ITER which consists of a huge 25 m diameter and 28 m high toroidal or doughnut-shaped reactor called Tokamak will confine (by intense magnetic fields that thread the reactor like a cage) a plasma of deuterium and tritium ions heated to 100 million degrees C.

The objective of ITER is to produce 500 MW of (thermal) power from a plasma that will be sustained for about 500 seconds. The sun produces one-tenth of a billion-billion-billion watts of power with a power density of 0.07 W/cu. m. ITER's 500 MW will, however, have a much higher density of 0.5 MW/cu.m.

According to Dr. Jacquinot, a plasma confinement duration of about 400 seconds has already been achieved (but with zero power output) last year at the French Tore Supra Tokamak reactor in Cadarache in Southern France. Cadarache was chosen as the site for the ITER on June 28, 2005, and Dr. Kaname Ikeda was chosen as the director-general of ITER in December 2005.

The Joint European Torus (JET), the precursor to ITER located in the U. K., has however succeeded in generating 16 MW of power but in a break-even situation only. That is, the energy produced was nearly the same as that spent in generating the high temperature plasma. The aim of ITER will be to demonstrate power generation with a positive gain.

Energy generation

ITER's first priority, Dr. Jacquinot said, will be to demonstrate energy generation at this scale in the time frame 2010-2020. The next step will be to generate 1.2 billion watts (giga watts) by 2030, a Demonstration Project generating 2 GW by 2035 and an industrial prototype generating 1.5 GW by 2050.

Indian research in fusion has been going on for the past two decades at IPR where an indigenously designed and built Tokamak called Aditya has been operating since 1989. It achieves temperatures of a few million degrees and holds plasma (of hydrogen ions) for fractions of a second. A new Superconducting Steady State Tokamak (SST-1) has now been built at a cost of Rs. 200 crore, which will be commissioned shortly, Dr. Kaw said. This aims to achieve 20-40 m deg. C and hold the plasma for 1000 seconds, the longest duration attempted anywhere so far.

India had planned to build an ITER scale reactor by 2030. Now participation in ITER will enable it to leapfrog in technology by two decades, Dr. Kaw said. India's participation will entail an investment of 9.09 per cent of the total ITER project cost, which works out to be about Rs. 2,500 crore over a 10-year period. Ninety per cent of this will be in the form of equipment to be built in India for ITER. A core scientific group headed by Dr. Kaw has been constituted by the Cabinet that will carry out ITER negotiations, both scientific and financial.

Member's contribution

Subsequent to India's entry a reallocation of individual member's contribution was arrived at in December 2005. According to Dr. Kaw, vessel ferromagnetic inserts, cryostat, cryolines and cryodistribution, heat rejection system, ion cyclotron and startup electron cyclotron heating power supplies, water cooling system diagnostic neutral beam, some diagnostics will be made by India.

The systems of high value and most significant among the above are the cryogenic systems, in particular the Crysostat which encloses the coils and the vacuum vessel of the reactor and is cooled to about minus 200 deg. C. to help keep the superconducting magnets at their operating temperature of minus 269 deg. C or four degrees above absolute zero.

Interestingly, before India's entry, the Cryostat was to be fabricated by China. But impressed by the Indian capabilities that they saw at Godrej & Boyce Ltd. and Larsen and Toubro Ltd., who have been in the business of making high precision equipment for defence, space and nuclear sectors, the ITER Committee awarded it to India, Dr. Kaw said. Asked about Control and Data Acquisition (CODAC) systems, which India was hoping to get, given the IT expertise available in the country, Dr. Kaw said that all the members have bid for CODAC systems but the package was still being evolved as a jointly-funded programme. "India could still get some of that as well," he said.

Prior to India's entry, it had been decided that the source of tritium for ITER would be CANDU reactors of Canada, an ITER non-member. The situation now, however, is significantly different. India too has a large nuclear power programme based on pressurised heavy water reactors, which also can supply tritium. Dr. Jacquinot indicated that the possibility of India as a source of tritium had certainly emerged though the ITER director-general would have to make that decision. According to DAE sources, a consensus policy decision on sourcing tritium is yet to be taken.

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