Fusion Music

THE HINDUSTAN TIMES
10/12/2005

It makes a lot of sense for the international consortium of the US, Russia, China, Japan, the EU and Korea to include India in its International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), being built in France. Unlike existing fission reactors where atoms are split to release energy, the ITER would generate energy by fusing atoms together. Fusion energy offers several advantages over nuclear power obtained from fission, like that absence of greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel power stations and the highly radioactive waste usually churned out by conventional nuclear power stations. Best of all, fusion reactors run on something as cheap as deuterium in sea water, which can be separated by electrolysis. Compare this with the complex and expensive methods required to extract uranium-235 from its sources, and it is easy to see why fusion energy is the holy grail of nuclear power research.

Initial hopes of researchers in the Fifties were quickly dampened when they realized the enormity of the technical problems involved. These include controlling the complex behavior of an electrically charged gas, plasma, which contains the atomic nuclei to be fused, and sustaining temperatures at over 100 million degrees to generate power. Scientists hope the ITER’s giant electromagnetic rings would corral plasma and achieve fusion at extremely high temperatures, providing a cheap and inexhaustible solution to world’s energy needs.

Although India is financially way behind developed countries, it has been doing pioneering plasma research for over two decades now. In fact, Aditya the first Indian Tokamak, or plasma device, was built in the late Eighties at the Institute for Plasma Research at Gandhi Nagar, and an advanced Steady State Super Conducting Tokamak is already operational. These are crucial stages for building an indigenous fusion reactor, which will probably come up in a few decades.