Biggest experimental nuclear reactor in world suffers delays

(MENAFN) During a visit to the plant this week, CEO Pietro Barabaschi told AFP news agency that it may take years for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which is now being developed in France, to begin producing meaningful energy.

By 2025, it was anticipated that the project, which was started in southern France in the 1980s with the goal of producing commercial electricity by nuclear fusion, would be a significant carbon-free energy source.

Barabaschi asserts that because that deadline "wasn't realistic in the first place," the project now confronts two new difficulties.

The incorrectly computed measurements for the joints of the blocks that need to be welded together for the reactor's chamber, he claimed, are the first problem. Second, a thermal shield that was used to confine the heat produced by nuclear fusion was recently found to have corrosion traces in it. Fixing these problems, according to Barabaschi, "is not a question of weeks, but months, even years."

Light atomic nuclei are pushed together in a heated plasma during the fusion process, which is contained inside a tokamak, a device with the form of a doughnut. The objective is to provide a practically endless source of power that is safe.

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