World's largest fusion plant set to create history

New Delhi : This Tuesday the world will mark a historic moment with the start of machine assembly of world's largest experimental fusion reactor at ITER facility in southern France in the virtual presence of host nation President Emmanuel Macron and government leaders from the seven ITER members, including India.

Officials say the launch of the ITER assembly phase is made possible by the arrival of components from all over the world in recent months.

It demonstrates the willingness of 30,000 people of the 35 partner countries and a million complements of the ITER international research project to join together in an enduring way in their common fight against climate change.

French President Macron and leaders from the European Union, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the ITER Organisation declare the beginning of a new energy era with the official start of the assembly of the fusion device at ITER.

Participation will be largely virtual and the event will be broadcast on YouTube live, a spokesperson for ITER told IANS. This month cryostat manufacturing came to an end in India. An industrial adventure that began in 2012 has come to an end for Larsen & Toubro teams in Hazira in Gujarat.

Eight years later, 12 segments of the top lid plus one central disk, 650 tonnes in all, will be assembled and welded on site.

Earlier, the soup-bowl-shaped stainless steel base of the cryostat -- the foundation of the machine that is India's in-kind contribution to ITER -- was lowered the neighbouring tokamak pit in ITER on May 28.

This operation to lower the heaviest single component of the ITER machine marked the culmination of a 10-year effort to design, manufacture, deliver, assemble and weld one of the most crucial components of the machine that will act as a thermos, insulating the magnetic system at cryogenic temperature from the outside environment.

The elements for the base section were delivered to ITER in December 2015 and the 1,250-tonne component was finalized in July last year. Also, the design of control (variable frequency drives, electrical panels, etc.) for the ITER cooling water system equipment was jointly done by ITER-India and L&T, while the manufacturing was carried out at L&T's Hazira facility.

ITER-India is the Indian domestic agency -- a specially empowered project of the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), an organisation under the Department of Atomic Energy.