India: Raising our own sun

[Anony]

AHMEDABAD: India has incubated the sun in a laboratory. After 25 years of exhausting trials, the Institute of Plasma Research (IPR) in Gandhinagar has put the country in the international elite league of only six nations, and has taken the first step to tap an alternative and endless source of clean energy.

The IPR has conceptualized and carried out the steady state superconducting fusion experiment with the Tokamak (SST-1). A Tokamak is a device that uses a magnetic field to confine plasma. The club of superconducting Tokamaks comprises South Korea, China, Japan, France, Russia and now India.

The state's scientists have been able to confine plasmas in machines, which is essential for creating an environment of hot plasmas to simulate conditions for fusion reactions that take place inside the sun. The heat generated in the reactor can be tapped to run massive turbines to generate power.

The IPR's experimental machine, called the SST-1, has successfully managed to produce and confine high temperature plasma, the fourth state of matter, from hydrogen with the help of superconducting magnets. In fact, the IPR's campus recorded that success not once but more than 200 times over the past year. This achievement was a zealously guarded secret for some time as IPR scientists wanted to improve the complex conditions in the machine that would hold the plasma - which exist for fractions of a second - for longer periods of time.

At the heart of SST-1 is the hot plasma. A large amount of current is passed to keep it hot and well confined inside a strong magnetic cage. Inside SST-1, microwaves, current of the order 52,000 amperes and fast moving neutral particle beams from injectors, heat a stream of hydrogen plasma. This heating turns the plasma temperature to millions of degrees. The plasma gets confined by superconducting magnets, thereby allowing the plasma to reside for a longer period. In a fusion-based reactor, the hot plasma will provide an environment conducive to fusion reaction to take place when hydrogen isotopes (deuterium and tritium) fuse to liberate energy in the form of fast neutrons.

The heat generated by stopping them will then be tapped for running turbines.

SST-1's success goes to 22,000 work days of non-stop toil, which initially started under the leadership of former IPR director Dr P K Kaw and mentor Dr P I John. Then the major part of the crucial effort was undertaken by the present IPR director Dr D Bora and the SST-1 mission leader Dr Subrata Pradhan and his team of 50 scientists who refurbished and reassembled the SST-1 Tokamak from scratch after initial failures. Bora told TOI, "The normal current in your plug points at home is 5 or 15 amperes. We are now moving on to pass higher currents of the order of 100,000 amperes in the plasma to confine it in a magnetic field." SST-1 is the first-time demonstration of integrated functioning of several state-of-the-art complex technologies in the world, says Pradhan.

Raising our own sun - The Times of India