PORTLAND, Maine — A Gorham-based manufacturer has won a $1.2 million contract from the international group building a nuclear fusion reactor in southern France.
MEGA Industries announced Tuesday that its coaxial components were selected for testing by a group of researchers based in India, who are collaborating on the project with teams from the United States, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Russia and China.
The company engineers and manufactures components for the military and aviation as well as particle accelerators and fusion research at a 40,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in the Gorham Industrial Park.
The company has 46 employees and plans to hire two new engineers and three machinists as a result of the new contract, according to a spokesman. It also has expanded its building by 7,500 square feet to add clean rooms for developing vacuum components used at projects like the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland.
MEGA said its components are candidates to serve as the “plumbing” system for the power source of the reactor. Its equipment will be used to test the power source components for the reactor.
Fusion reactors require large amounts of energy to start and a fusion reactor has not yet produced more power than it consumed. That’s what researchers at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project hope to achieve.
The magazine Nature reported in July that the project has met with substantial delays, putting it 11 years behind schedule and far over budget, with an expected project cost of roughly $50 billion, 10 times more than initial projections.
Construction for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project in Cadarache, France, started in 2007 and is scheduled for completion in 2027, with plans for other research reactors in the meantime. It is the world’s largest planned reactor using fusion, which is the process by which the sun generates heat and light and fuses more complex atoms together from hydrogen.
Because the reaction involves the combination of atoms, rather than splitting high-energy isotopes like the uranium used in nuclear reactors such as the former Maine Yankee in Wiscasset, researchers believe a fusion reactor would generate less radioactive material as a byproduct and have a nearly unlimited fuel source using the most commonly found atoms.