Russia has every chance to become a leader in the field of thermonuclear research
Controlled thermonuclear fusion has been the holy grail of modern physics for 60 years. This is understandable: with the implementation of the UTS project, humanity will receive an inexhaustible source of cheap and, importantly, clean energy.
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Since the beginning of the thermonuclear era, our country has been at the forefront of research, moving forward by leaps and bounds and establishing a unique technical fashion for devices for studying high-temperature plasma. In particular, it was in the USSR that the idea was first put forward (interestingly, by an ordinary soldier of the Soviet Army) and technically implemented the idea of a tokamak - a toroidal magnetic trap chamber for a thermonuclear discharge.
At one time it seemed that tokamaks were about to break out of laboratories and, instead of electrophysical installations, would turn into reactors, but over time the topic stalled - the radiation destruction of materials stood in the way of CTS - and already in the second half of the 80s, scientists around the world expressed skeptical forecasts that the prototype A thermonuclear reactor will appear no earlier than in 50 years, that is, closer to 2040.
After this, humanity calmed down and agreed to move from the assault on the thermonuclear fortress to a long-term siege through the construction of the huge international tokamak ITER in France. But even here it turned out that it was easier to come to an agreement than to move on to real business. The ITER project, valued at $12 billion at the start, was constantly postponed, has grown in price by 10 billion, and, according to the latest data, will be completed no earlier than 2025.
In fact, the agreement on the construction of ITER can be considered a decision by many states not to put all their eggs in one basket, so as not to remain on the sidelines of progress if something happens. Russia also continues to participate in the project, paying its 1/11 share of the costs, which reached half a billion dollars in 2016.
The public has somehow gotten used to the idea that in post-Soviet Russia mass interest is focused on all sorts of celebrities and scandals around media figures, and has already forgotten with what excitement it grabbed the newspapers 40 years ago to find out the news from the Institute of Atomic Energy. Kurchatov, in which the country’s nuclear pulse beat.
But the most surprising thing is that Western sources, actively popularizing science, entered a stagnation zone with the topic of CTS and stopped reporting on the work of scientists, which creates the impression of a lack of progress in thermonuclear energy - everything supposedly froze in anticipation of the end of the long-term construction of ITER.
In fact, this is not so, and a serious breakthrough emerged quite recently - in 2015 and 2016, while just 10 years ago it seemed that a thermonuclear reactor would not be created not only by 2040, but even in the foreseeable future.
The first good news came from China. In 2013, at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, on the experimental tokamak EAST (a modified version of the Russian-Chinese tokamak HT-7), it was possible to stabilize plasma in the H-mode for 30 seconds, which was a serious breakthrough in the field of controlled fusion.
In 2015, the South Korean KSTAR tokamak using superconducting circuits managed to contain a plasma at a temperature of 40 million K in the H-mode for 55 seconds, which was an amazing achievement.
In 2016, the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced a new tokamak record. According to Xinhua, the electrophysical device successfully maintained a plasma discharge with a temperature of 50 million K for 102 seconds in the H-mode. Currently, Chinese scientists are preparing to set a new record for holding thermonuclear plasma in the EAST tokamak for up to 400 seconds.
The H-mode is a mode of existence of a plasma when heat loss from it sharply decreases, and the temperature in the center increases. The H-mode is necessary to obtain high energy output from thermonuclear fusion in tokamaks. However, the H-mode has unpleasant ELM instabilities (changes at the edge of the plasma column), which must be dealt with in order for the thermonuclear reactor to be able to constantly maintain it.
The success of Asian scientists gave new hope and renewed interest in national nuclear research. American researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology generalized the experience of their Chinese and South Korean colleagues by building an ARC tokamak, which eliminates all expensive methods of heating the plasma, leaving one of the most affordable - radio frequency (as in microwaves).
In Russia, too, they did not sit idly by and conducted their own experiments. In particular, scientists revised the usual approach to the tokamak configuration by building the newest spherical unit “Globus-M”.
But the biggest surprise at the end of December 2017 was prepared by physicists from the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok. At the Institute of Nuclear Physics. Academician Budker SB RAS, the ceremonial launch of the Spiral Magnetic Open Trap (RESIN) took place.
It is curious that the Siberians moved away from the generally accepted plasma confinement scheme such as a tokamak or stellarator and returned to one of the early plasma confinement schemes of the “mirror cell” type, when a fiery clot is held in a linear system or simply in a pipe, locked at both ends by “plugs” of magnetic fields . With new ideas, of course.
It was already mentioned above that one of the main problems in the implementation of CTS was structural: the materials of the installations were destroyed due to the radiation effects of plasma of millions of degrees. The Siberians took a different path - non-radioactive fusion, which in turn required much higher temperatures than in tokamaks. For this purpose, nuclear scientists have developed a scheme that they themselves call a “meat grinder.”
“Plasma particles tend to fly out of this “meat grinder,” but if we turn the handle in the opposite direction, they will move backward, so the plasma will remain trapped,” explains Anton Vyacheslavovich, senior researcher, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences at the BINP SB RAS Sudnikov. According to preliminary estimates, such principles will reduce plasma energy losses by 20−100 times.
In addition, scientists from Novosibirsk managed to exclude one of the most problematic components of thermonuclear fuel - superheavy hydrogen tritium. In addition to the fact that tritium is radioactive, it is produced in nuclear reactors. Therefore, we are talking about reducing the cost and increasing the level of safety of the experiment, and in the future - of the entire thermonuclear energy industry.
Scientists also talk about another prospect for installing RESIN - with its help, new prospects in astronautics are opening up. Based on the installation, in the near future it will be possible to create a working thermonuclear rocket engine, bypassing the nuclear stage.
Suffice it to say that in the USSR and the USA, almost 40 years ago, attempts were made to create nuclear rocket engines, and technically there is nothing impossible in them, if not for one thing - the heavy physical protection of the crew from the radiation of the reactor.
Looking at the photographs of the SMOLA installation, you can see its compactness and lack of physical protection due to the implementation of the principle of non-radiation fusion. That is, if successful, the device could be folded into a small rocket engine.
All that remains is to evaluate the achievements of Novosibirsk scientists who do not have the astronomical budgets of the Skolkovo and Rusnano image projects, the output of which in science and technology is incommensurate with the funds pumped into them.
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