MOSCOW, December 26. /TASS/. Excluding a partner from the world’s largest International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is impossible, with the project only allowing the possibility of independent withdrawal, the director of the ITER-Center private institution of the Rosatom state corporation, Anatoly Krasilnikov, told a TASS news conference on Monday.
When asked whether Russia’s expulsion had ever been discussed, he said, "The ITER project agreement does not envisage the expulsion of any partner," and in the event of individual exit, a member country would still have to fulfill all of its commitments. "Meaning, one should supply all the iron necessary for the project, and pay for the subsequent transformation of the territory into a green lawn once experiments are underway," he remarked. "Therefore, it would be silly of one to leave."
Krasilnikov pointed to the United States, who he said once attempted to quit the project and reentered it three years later. "A special commission concluded that such a step would not be feasible," he recalled. While every country, including the US and Russia, finds ITER necessary and mandatory in reactor building, whenever a member country decides to withdraw from the project, it will have `to take the step alone’ and pay the huge ITER costs on its own, the expert explained. Besides, individual exit from ITER would mean isolating a country’s researchers from the global scientific community, according to Krasilnikov.
Academician Yevgeny Velikhov initiated the project to bring international efforts together to build a next-generation thermonuclear experimental reactor. His idea came to fruition when the-then leaders of the Soviet Union, the US and France - Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Raegan and Francois Mitterrand - signed an appropriate agreement.
ITER, a project for what may become the world’s first international thermonuclear experimental reactor, is currently being built jointly by the EU, Russia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States near the Cadarache research center in southern France. If the project is a success, humankind may obtain an almost inexhaustible power source. On November 1, Russian experts sent the poloidal field coil PF-1, a key element designed for starting and maintaining thermonuclear fusion, to the construction site in France.