http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080515/107456204.html
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Last year, St Petersburg's Ioffe Physics and Technical Institute reported further advances in improving the performance of one of the most important elements of a fusion reactor - a tokamak. Today, the world has 300 different tokamaks, built to study controlled thermonuclear fusion. This reaction is the opposite of what happens in traditional nuclear reactors: nuclei fuse rather than divide, releasing enormous amounts of energy.
The Institute's tokamak is an experimental model. It cannot initiate fusion, but it gives scientists an opportunity to study the processes that occur in a tokamak, and to test structural components for a larger reactor.
Specifically, scientists have devised a plasma gun, a device which injects the working gases - hydrogen and tritium - the fuel for the fusion reactor - into the tokamak. Their gun has already attracted worldwide attention, attracting several bids to buy it.
But no one is going to sell the technology as yet: the current priority is to bring the research to its logical conclusion. The technology has not yet been pushed to its limit. If the plasma's injection rate is increased to 800 or 1,000 kilometers per second, the gun could rival the tried and tested, but less forward-looking, technology of fuel feeding at the $12bn International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor ITER in France.