How is L&T playing a big role in creating a miniature Sun on Earth?

Creating a miniature Sun on Earth. This is what the world’s seven major countries, including India, are experimenting with to generate immense clean energy from fusion reactors.

Their ambition has hit a key milestone: the world’s largest nuclear fusion experiment, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Cadarache, France, is inching closer to commissioning. Fusion reactors replicate the process that occurs inside the Sun to produce energy.

Bringing in decades of hi-tech engineering experience, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) has played an important role by deploying advanced technology for its completion.

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What is L&T’s role?

L&T has been working with the ITER project for over a decade. In 2024, it bagged a contract for the deployment of critical advanced technologies for the assembly of ports and complex parts with the Vacuum Vessel at the facility in southern France.

L&T is also supporting ITER in developing state-of-the-art technology and pioneering hardware for fusion systems that will be installed inside the ITER Tokamak’s Vacuum Vessel, helping control the plasma essential for fusion energy production.

In 2020, L&T manufactured and delivered the largest components of the ITER reactor, called the Cryostat. It is the world’s largest stainless-steel high-vacuum pressure vessel, weighing over 3,800 tonnes.

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Why are fusion reactors gaining traction?

In China, fusion reactors are advancing towards industrialisation, as they have been identified as one of the future growth frontiers in the country’s 15th Five-Year Plan.

The world has been experimenting with fusion reactors for decades. It is the energetic process that powers our own Sun, and scientists have been trying to replicate that process on Earth — a difficult task that could essentially provide limitless clean energy with zero carbon emissions and no hazardous radioactive waste, unlike nuclear fission. It requires handling ultra-high temperatures, maintaining strong magnetic fields, and keeping hot plasma stable.

ITER, the world’s biggest nuclear fusion experiment, recently received the final shipment of necessary components to assemble the giant magnet at the heart of the reactor. The experiment is funded and operated by China, the European Union (EU), India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the US.

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