HIGH-tech company Oxford Instruments has won a £30m contract to supply 58 tonnes of superconducting wire to Iter, Europe's giant nuclear fusion machine.
Iter, being built at Cadarache in the South of France, is the final step towards a prototype power station, and one of the largest scientific projects ever undertaken. The wire will be supplied by the Oxfordshire company’s US subsidiary, Oxford Superconducting Technology.
Nuclear fusion taps energy from reactions like those that heat the sun, and its proponents claim it is cleaner than nuclear fission and fossil fuels. Iter uses superconducting magnets to contain the reaction and needs more than 500 tonnes of niobium-tin superconducting strand.
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