Russia’s Project Centre ITER has said that the first Russian gyrotron complexes are being sent to the construction site of the international thermonuclear experimental reactor ITER under construction in France. Three trailers with the equipment left Nizhny Novgorod on 13th September and a fourth machine will leave on 16th September.
The gyrotron complexes are high-tech devices for additional plasma heating and current generation. The concept of a gyrotron as a microwave generator was first proposed in the 1960s. Today Russia is a world leader in their production. The Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences is developing and supervising the development of these devices, and the production is carried out at the GICOM enterprise in Nizhny Novgorod.
“It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the gyrotron complexes, since without these most complex systems it is impossible to obtain the first plasma in the reactor. The operation of ITER without gyrotrons is unfeasible,” said Anatoly Krasilnikov, head of the Russian ITER Agency (part of Rosatom). “This is the result of many years of painstaking work by our scientists and engineers, who have vast experience and groundwork in the manufacture of such devices.”
Russia is responsible for the manufacture and supply of eight (of 24) gyrotron complexes and related systems for ITER. To date, six devices have passed acceptance tests, and the seventh complex is being manufactured. In December last year, Russia sent a batch of auxiliary gyrotron systems to ITER including water cooling equipment, cryocoolers, microwave beam formation systems and other high-tech items.
Image courtesy of ITER Project Center
