The MEPhI project for the creation, manufacture and installation of diagnostic equipment, critical for the long-term reactor operation, into the vacuum chamber of the ITER fusion reactor (tokamak) won the tender of the ITER International Organization with a price of 5 million euros. The authors of the project are a scientific group led by professor of the Institute for Laser and Plasma Technologies (LaPlas) of the MEPhI Leon Begrambekov.

Foreign projects Alsyom (EU), Doosan Babcock Limited (UK), Eiffage (EU), GA (USA), Jacobs (EU) and Safe Technologies (UK) also participated in the tender. The most serious competitor of MEPhI in the tender was the international company China Nuclear Industry 23, which applied in consortium with the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The contract concluded between MEPhI and ITER is designed for a period of up to six years. It will include development, prototyping, manufacturing, assembly and commissioning of a full-scale automated dust sampling system from the vacuum chamber of the ITER tokamak.

During operation of the tokamak, dust from beryllium-tungsten microparticles formed as a result of erosion of the chamber walls by the plasma will be accumulated in the vacuum chamber. This can become one of the serious problems in the operation of the reactor, since the accumulation of a large amount of dust increases the risk of a dust explosion during a sudden devacuum of the chamber.

In addition, radioactive tritium, the permissible amount of which in the reactor is strictly regulated, can settle on the surface of dust particles. That is why researches has to develop a system that will allow them to measure the amount of dust accumulated without devacuuming the installation and to decide whether to continue the operation of the reactor or to stop it for cleaning.

ITER is the project of the first international experimental thermonuclear reactor, which is being built in France by the joint efforts of the EU countries, China, India, Russia, the USA, South Korea and Japan. MEPhI employees have been successfully carrying out the research and the personnel training for the ITER project since 2016.