Strona Główna KPK

Kazakhstan also has a tokamak that happens to share with ITER the same "godfather": Evgeny Velikhov, the Russian scientist who was instrumental in the launching of the ITER Project in the mid-1980s, and who played a similar role a dozen years later for the Kazakhstan Material Testing (КТМ) tokamak.

 

ITER and Kazakhstan go back a long way. Kazakhstani personnel and institutions were involved in the early ITER design phase during the Soviet period, and as early as 2007 the country expressed an intention to continue its participation in the project. Over the past ten years, several delegations from Kazakhstan have visited ITER. Last Tuesday, on 21st February 2017, the proposal for collaboration was renewed. In the discussion that took place with ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot, Erlan Batyrbekov, director of the Kazakhstan Nuclear National Center, offered to establish a legal cooperation framework between ITER and the institution he heads.( Erlan Batyrbekov was accompanied by Alexandr Vurim, Deputy-Director of the Institute of Atomic Energy, and Vladimir Vityuk, Head of Laboratory). Among other things, this collaboration would enable the ITER Organization to access the KTM facility for the testing of plasma-facing materials.