The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), the Kurchatov Institute and Rosatom have agreed to jointly develop promising thermonuclear and plasma technologies, Viktor Ilgisonis, director of scientific and technical research and development at Rosatom said on 27 November.

“In the next four years, the development of thermonuclear research in our country will be ensured by the federal project “Thermonuclear and Plasma Technologies” as part of the comprehensive programme “Development of equipment, technologies and research in the field of atomic energy use in the Russian Federation for the period up to 2024” developed by Rosatom in accordance with a Presidential decree,” he said.

“The material base and infrastructure of thermonuclear research in the institutes of RAS and Rosatom at the Kurchatov Institute will be substantially updated. Promising technologies will be developed and samples of new equipment will be created, which in practice will demonstrate the productivity of the ongoing thermonuclear research,” he added.

Ilgisonis said that the Kurchatov Institute, where the first and all subsequent large tokamaks were built, was originally established as Laboratory No. 2 of the USSR Academy of Sciences. With the establishment of an academic town near Novosibirsk, the current GI Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics began the most ambitious research in the field of open magnetic traps. The largest stellarator for its time was built at the PN Lebedev Physics Institute of RAS. (It is now housed at the AM Prokhorov General Physics Institute). At the same time, scientists from the AF Ioffe Physics and Technology Institute worked on compact (spherical) tokamaks.

The current thermonuclear project was initiated by members of the Academy of Sciences Mikhail Kovalchuk and Yevgeny Velikhov, and the entire complex programme was developed under the personal leadership of Rosatom General Director Alexei Likhachev."

Rosatom said the project “bears a truly national character – in terms of the scale of tasks, breadth of coverage and level of planned results.”