It is interesting to know

* Read and retell the following text.

Titanic Power Needed for a Massive Movie Set

Aggreko supplied more than 8.5 MW for the production of "Titan­ic", the Golden Globe Award winning blockbuster. It took seven months to film the movie, which is the largest budget film to date with

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Section I. Power Engineering

more than $ 200 million spent. For the most part, the electrical power was used for the major lighting requirements of the evening shots (съемки) of the ship as it sat in the seven-acre, 17 million gallon (гал­лон = 4,54 л) exterior seawater tank. The task of lighting the 770 foot long replica, only 10 percent smaller than the actual ship, took more than about 2 MW. Special effects such as the final stages of disaster, when the ship is separated into two pieces with the front half sinking in 40 feet of water, took for 1 million pound hydraulic lifts, power by gen­erators, to lift the steel and wood replica to a vertical position.

Unit 14 i FUSION

PARTI

• Read the text given below and say whether it is about nuclear power or not.

Fusion power offers the potential of an almost limitless source of energy for future generations but it also presents some formidable sci­entific and engineering challenges. It is called 'fusion' because it is based on fusing light nuclei such as hydrogen isotopes to release ener­gy. The process is similar to that which powers the sun and other stars. Effective energy-producing fusions require that gas from a combina­tion of isotopes of hydrogen — deuterium and tritium — is heated to very high temperatures (100 million degrees Centigrade) and confined for at least one second. One way to achieve these conditions is to use magnetic confinement. The most promising configuration at present is the tokamak, a Russian word for a torus-shaped magnetic chamber.

The History of Fusion

The original large-scale experimental fusion device on which British physicists worked during the 1940s and 50s was housed in a hangar at Harwell. The device called ZETA - Zero Energy Toroidal Assembly was at first, shrouded in secrecy but with the temporary thaw in the Cold War created in the late 1950s by the visit of Kruschev and Bulganin. The Russians by bringing their leading fusion expert Academician I.V. Kurchatov to give a lecture "The Possibility of Producing Thermo­nuclear Reactions in a Gas Discharge" revealed their own work in the field and we shared our experience with ZETA. International coop­eration began and is an absolute prerequisite in the development of fu­sion research with the principal countries involved in large-scale fusion research being the European Union, USA, Russia and Japan, support­ed by vigorous programmes in China, Brazil, Canada, and Korea.

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The Place of Fusion in Europe's Power Source Mix

Prophetically, one of the great Russian pioneers of fusion physics said: "We will not harness the potential of fusion until it becomes a necessi­ty" According to a study undertaken by the World Energy Council, by 2020, Western European oil and gas reserves will have declined to a point at which only Norway is expected to have significant reserves of natural gas and Western Europe may well enter a phase of declining oil produc­tion and rising oil import dependency. In 25 years time, Europe's de­pendence on the external supply of conventional fuels is likely to have increased from the current level of around 50% to around 70%.

Another important factor is likely to be a further tightening of inter­national agreement regarding C0₂ emissions to decelerate the effects of global warming and consequent climatic changes. All this amounts to the need for intensified scientific research to achieve greater effi­ciency and conservation of our energy resources.

Given that, in the short term, some contribution will be made by various renewable energy systems — primarily biomass, hydro, solar, wind and geothermal systems — which is thought unlikely to exceed 20% of the total by 2020, the currently available non-fossil alternative to provide the major proportion of the outstanding 80% is nuclear fis­sion but it is also clear that fusion could have an important role to play in the energy balance.

International cooperation is strong with the focus on the Interna­tional Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which will have the same magnetic geometry as JET [http://www.iter.org]. Similar but much bigger than JET and with the addition of a number of key tech­nologies essential for a future power station, ITER will be able to op­erate for very much longer periods (over 1000 second pulses) and will help to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fu­sion power. Most importantly, it will be the first fusion device designed to achieve ignition and sustained burn — at which point the reactor becomes self-heating and productive.