Close-up of giant magnet coil that can lift an aircraft carrier out of the water

The central solenoid coil of the ITER fusion reactor's core has a magnetic field strong enough to lift an aircraft carrier out of the water and has been dubbed "the world's strongest magnet".

The central solenoid (CS) is made up of six modules and is considered the heart of the ITER fusion reactor. The CS consists of cylindrical coils of electrical conductors that generate extremely strong currents from the plasma.

ITER’s central solenoid is about 13-18m high, the base is 4.3m in diameter and weighs up to 1,000 tonnes. The bundles of wires inside will operate independently to produce huge electromagnetic forces in different directions. To launch the shuttle, the base will have to withstand a force twice as large as the thrust.

The ITER fusion reactor is under construction in southern France. The first CS module will be delivered in the fall of 2020. The world's most powerful magnet coil was built by US defense and energy giant General Atomics and was completed in 2021.

Please watch the video of the process of engineers building the ITER reactor provided by Sci Tech Daily.

CS plays a crucial role in the magnet system in ITER. The ITER fusion reactor generates energy by combining two light hydrogen nuclei, deuterium and tritium, to form a heavier helium nucleus. ITER will generate 500 megawatts of electricity, 10 times the energy needed to operate it.

Fusion reactions only occur at temperatures of about 120 million degrees Celsius, many times higher than the temperature at the core of the Sun (about 15 million degrees Celsius). ITER uses a toroidal magnetic chamber called a Tokamak to generate these super-hot temperatures.

The construction of ITER’s toroidal Central Solenoid magnet required 100,000 kilometers of niobium-tin (Nb3Sn) superconducting wire weighing more than 400 tons, fabricated by ITER project suppliers — China, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States. Production began in 2009 and ended in 2014, at a rate of about 150 tons per year. The total length of Nb3Sn wire produced for ITER will wrap around the Earth at the equator twice.

When completed, ITER's 100,000km of superconducting wire made from an alloy of niobium and tin at -269 degrees Celsius will create a magnetic field as strong as 5 Tesla, 100,000 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field (about 25 to 65 micro tesla).

The Big Numbers About ITER

150 MILLION °C

In ITER, the temperature will reach 150 million °C, 10 times the temperature at the core of our Sun at 15 million °C, 2500 times the temperature at the surface of the Sun at 6,000 °.

23,000 TONS

ITER will weigh 23,000 tons, three times the weight of the Eiffel Tower. The complex machine will have about a million components.

310 TONS

Each of the ITER tokamak's 18 toroidal (D-shaped) field coils is 17 meters tall, 9 meters wide, and weighs 310 tons, roughly the weight of a fully loaded Boeing 747-300.

104 KM

A special 104km track called the ITER Route had to be modified to transport the heaviest components of the ITER machine.

The heaviest component of ITER will weigh nearly 900 tonnes including the transport vehicle, the tallest component will be about four stories high, some will be 33 metres long, some 9 metres wide.

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