NOVOSINIRSK, September 2. /TASS/. Scientists from the Nuclear Physics Institute (NPI) of the Siberian division of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) have developed unique equipment for a prototype environment-friendly thermonuclear reactor being designed in the United States, Alexei Vassilyev, scientific secretary of the RAS Siberian division, said on Wednesday,
The work was done under a multimillion-dollar contract between the Siberian institute and US company Tri Alpha Energy (TAE), the scientific secretary said but declined to specify the full cost of the delivery.
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"We have cooperated for years. We have a number of contracts. We continue developing equipment for the company," he said.
According to the RAS Siberian division’s official publication, Science in Siberia, the equipment was successfully used in experiments involving TAE’s S2-U plasma facility. This produced impressive results of confining plasma at a temperature of 10 million degrees.
TAE, a private California-based company, is developing an original thermonuclear fusion facility of its own. The system that TAE is using allows it to combine the advantages offered by linear magnetic traps and tokamaks.
The design is expected to embody the environmentally friendly neutronless thermonuclear reaction of fusion of a proton nucleus and a boron isotope with the release of three alpha particles.
The NPI-TAE cooperation is not limited to deliveries of research equipment under commercial contracts. The institute is a major scientific center for development of linear thermonuclear systems having much in common with TAE’s concept. NPI personnel have been proactive in experiments conducted with the use of the S2-U facility, while US physicists actively participate in joint work at NPI’s unique open-ended magnetic traps.