Ignitor machine

IGNITOR is the Italian name for a nuclear research project of magnetic confinement fusion, developed by ENEA Laboratories in Frascati. Construction (in Russia) is not complete.

The project theory is based on ignited plasma in tokamak. Started in 1977 by Prof. Bruno Coppi of MIT, IGNITOR is based on the 1970s Alcator machine at MIT which pioneered the high magnetic field approach to plasma magnetic confinement, continued with the Alcator C/C-Mod at MIT and the FT/FTU series of experiments.

Compared to the ITER international project, IGNITOR would be much smaller and cheaper: the ITER reactor is 19,000 tons in weight while the IGNITOR is only 500 tons in weight. IGNITOR is designed to produce approximately 100 MW of fusion power (and ITER to produce ~500 MW fusion power).

At a meeting with the scientific attachés of the European embassies in Moscow in early February 2010 Mikhail Kovalchuk, Director of the Kurchatov Institute, announced that an initiative aimed at developing a fast paced joint research programme in nuclear fusion research was strongly supported by the Governments of Russia and Italy.

The original proposal had been initiated earlier by Evgeny Velikhov (President of the Kurchatov Institute) and Bruno Coppi (Head of the High Energy Plasmas Undertaking, MIT) during the early developments of the Alcator C-Mod programme at MIT, where well known scientists of the Kurchatov Institute made key contributions to experiments that identified the unique confinement and purity properties of the high density plasmas produced by the high field Alcator machine. In effects this investigated, for the first time, physical processes leading to attain self-sustained fusion burning plasmas.

The collaboration with the Kurchatov Institute is directed at the construction of the Ignitor machine, the first experiment proposed to achieve ignition conditions by nuclear fusion reactions on the basis of existing knowledge of plasma physics and available technologies. Ignitor is part of the line of research on high magnetic field, experiments producing high density plasmas that began with the Alcator and the Frascati Torus programs at MIT and in Italy, respectively. It remains, at the world level, the only experiment capable of reaching ignition by the magnetic field confinement approach. However, several fusion scientists have contested the claim made for IGNITOR that it is a bigger step towards fusion power than the international ITER project.

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Wikipedia