SPUTNIKNEWS – January 3, 2017: Scientists at Russia’s Siberia-based Budker Institute of nuclear physics (INP) are planning to complete the first stage of their work on the development of an alternative fusion reactor, namely increasing the steady plasma heating by three- or four-fold, Deputy Director of the Institute Aleksander Ivanov told RIA Novosti.
Earlier, the INP announced plans to develop an alternative thermonuclear reactor using open traps, which will be more commercially attractive compared to the international thermonuclear experimental reactor (ITER) currently under development.
“We have confirmed recent results on plasma heating to the temperature scale of ten million degrees; this is a very important milestone for our work. Now we can seriously begin to consider options for the establishment of fusion systems based on open traps,” Aleksander Ivanov told RIA Novosti.
The ITER fusion reactor has been designed to produce 500 megawatts of output power for several seconds while needing 50 megawatts to operate. Thereby the machine aims to demonstrate the principle of producing more energy from the fusion process than is used to initiate it, the holy-grail of fusion physics, but so far something that has not yet been achieved in any fusion reactor. Link: Read Complete Article
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