Despite the war, Russia sends the giant magnet to France for the Iter project

It is one of the most ambitious projects of the moment and it could not work without this imposing piece designed in Russia. It is a ring-shaped magnet: nine meters in diameter, 200 tons. It took eight years of work for Russian engineers to design it and it has therefore just left Saint-Petersburg on board a ship, heading for Marseilles where it should arrive in two weeks. In scientific jargon, this is called a “poloidal field coil”. It will be one of the pieces of the famous “Tokamak”, another barbaric name to designate this machine which is being built in Cadarache, in the Bouches-du-Rhone. It’s as if the researchers were making an artificial sun.

The Iter program aims to study nuclear fusion, a source of energy for stars like the sun. Not to be confused with nuclear fission, which our current nuclear power plants rely on. This coil sent by the Russians is part of a set of super-powerful magnets capable of controlling the plasma inside the reactor.

With the war in Ukraine, many international programs have been suspended or even cancelled. This is the case in space with ExoMars, a robot was to be sent to the red planet last September, but this Russian-European project has been abandoned. With the sanctions imposed on Moscow, the Iter scientists feared a questioning of the project in which Russia is participating. But “everyone would have been a loser”, assures the Russian official in charge of manufacturing the element sent this week.

The Iter project is already late, in particular because of the pandemic and the complexity of this pharaonic project. The objective today is to launch a first test of the reactor in December 2025. That is 40 years after the launch of the project by Soviet Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and American President Ronald Reagan.