POLEMA in the global arena

POLEMA JSC has racked up another significant accomplishment. The company has won a tender to supply bimetallic tungsten-copper plates to the D.V. Efremov NIIEFA Federal State Unitary Enterprise. Thanks to its years of experience and its reputation as a reliable supplier both on the domestic and international market, this is already the second time that  POLEMA JSC has won this tender.

This is not some trivial supply of product, but rather participation in an extensive international project whose goal is to demonstrate the scientific and technical possibilities for generating energy using controlled thermonuclear reactions.

The project partners are Russia, the European Union, Japan, China, India, South Korea, and the United States. As part of the project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) will be built at the Cadarache research center in France, by 2017. The reactor is poised to become the world's leading active thermonuclear electric power station. Based on preliminary estimates, ITER will be the most expensive scientific project since the International Space Station.

ITER will be built according to a conceptual design first developed a half-century ago in the USSR. The name of this type of structure—tokamak—was thought up by physicists Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov. Thus, it is more than natural that the project involve broad participation in Russia. In the project, the D.V. Efremov NIIEFA FSUE will head up the cooperate of domestic companies to create a superconducting magnetic system. JSC POLEMA's area of responsibility will be thermal protection of one of the tokamak's central units—the so-called diverter.

Participation in this project speaks to a stable future for JSC POLEMA, since ITER is one of the few long-term projects in the world. In addition, ITER will help boost the prestige of JSC POLEMA in the global arena of non-ferrous metallurgy.