Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Welcome India in ITER

India is going to join an international effort towards producing controlled nuclear fusion. A welcome decision ofcourse. Controlled nuclear fusion is something which the whole world has been struggling to achieve for past so many decades. I have a longing relationship with this technology - my first job. India has two Tokamaks which tries to create plasma in a helical tube - Aditya (India's first Tokamak) and [S]teady [S]tate [T]okamak-1 which utilizes all the goodies of super conductors, Lasers, RF etc. The catch is not to produce the plasma (even your tubelight has it) but to sustain it. SST-1 was a big leap over the old Aditya but not close enough to sustain the plasma over a considerable period of time. When I was working in the Institute (Aditya was operational and we were working on SST-1) we always looked upto ITER which happens to be an international effort (EU + US + Japan). It was our dream and the mission to get SST (1&2) operational and effective. I now see it happening.

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