Europe has finished its spectacular cryogenic plant

The cover photography of this article was taken just a month ago in the vicinity of ITER (International Thermonuclear Experctor reactor), The experimental reactor of nuclear fusion that an international consortium led by Europe is building in the French town of Cadarache. What we see in this image is A cryogenization plantand it is a fundamental installation to bring this very complex machine to fruition.

It is paradoxical that Iter needs an extreme cooling plant. The plasma confined in your vacuum camera which will contain the deuterium and tritium nuclei that will intervene in the fusion reaction will reach a temperature of at least 150 million degrees Celsius, so a priori may seem strange that an installation is expressly designed to generate an extreme cold. But it is not. It has all the meaning of the world if we keep in mind that superconductor magnets, Creobombs and thermal shields need to reach a temperature of up to -269 degrees Celsius.

Iter’s cryogenic plant is an engineering prodigy

The superconductor magnets placed on the outside of the vacuum chamber of this nuclear fusion reactor have the responsibility of generating the magnetic field necessary to confine plasma inside. They are also responsible for controlling and stabilizing it. These magnets weigh 10,000 tons and are manufactured in an alloy of niobio and tin, or niobio and titanium, which acquires the superconductivity when cools with a supercritical helium until reaching a temperature of -269 ºC.

This requirement justifies the need to put a powerful cooling system like the one that has devised Europe for Iter. In the construction of this experimental nuclear fusion reactor, the US, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan and the United Kingdom are also involved, but the Cryogenization Plant has been commissioned by Fusion for Energy (F4E), the organization of the European Union that coordinates Europe’s contribution to Iter developmentthe French company Air Liquide and technicians integrated in the structure of Iter.

In this photograph we can see the nitrogen compressors installed in the Iter cryogenic plant.

This extreme refrigeration installation will be responsible for supplying liquid helium to 4.5 Kelvin (-269 ° C) to superconductor magnets and criobombs, and also gaseous helium at 80 Kelvin (-193 ºC) to thermal shields. Creobombs are empty ultraalt devices that are responsible for eliminating gases inside the vacuum chamber. In order to do so, they must work at an extremely low temperature. And, on the other hand, the thermal shields are responsible for protecting some critical elements of the reactor, such as superconductor magnets, the heat that emits the confined plasma inside the vacuum chamber.

Iter’s cryogenic plant has an area similar to that of a football field (just over 7,100 m²) and contains several 26 -meter high storage tanks. These figures help us intuit how enormous this critical installation is. As we just checked, Without it, nuclear fusion would be absolutely impossible. This Grigory Kouzmenko statementF4E manager, invites us to tie Iter’s future with a reasonable optimism: “We have entered the most exciting phase of the project, in which all the efforts of previous years finally are specified and we can benefit from the collaboration based on the confidence between all the parties.”

Images | Fusion for Energy

More information | Fusion for Energy

In Xataka | From today Spain has the key to nuclear fusion: Granada’s particle accelerator is already a reality