The VIP-guest was demonstrated components for projects in the field of megascience, produced by the Institute and showed production of medical devices. According to Oleg Filatov, General Director of the Institute, no international megascience project today could do without the NIIEFA. This kind of orders these days play significant part in the general stock of contracts. Thus NIIEFA produces magnets for XFEL laser with about 200 items of different modifications already made, while by the end of the year 2014 the total amount to be produced is 715. “Those are highly-accurate unique magnetic lenses. There are not so many potential produces of those in the world”, -Vitaly Tanaev, Chief Deputy General Director for Production, Pilot Plant Director, is proud to say.
The prospects of this direction the Institute connects with the FAIR research center creation in Darmstadt. The project will need more than 120 magnets, some of them weighing more than 25 tons.
Another item in the Institute’s stock of orders is equipment for ITER. “We were ordered to develop technology and produce the 9 meters in diameter PF1coil. Even sending it to France will be an issue. We rented a plant’s workshop on the Neva bank in order to produce the equipment there and further deliver it by water”, – says Tanaev.
The IAEA General Director was quite impressed with the things he saw. “I participated in the negotiations concerning ITER some 15-20 years ago, when everything was yet at the site-choosing stage and I’m really glad to finally see the place where the components of this installment are produced”, – said Amano to journalists after visiting the NIIEFA.
Winning over Siemens
The head of the IAEA was also shown the section of medical tomographs and cyclotrons. “We are currently preparing for the butch production of domestic medical devices. By the end of this year the reconstruction is finishing”, – says Oleg Filatov. The capacity of production is about 29 diagnostic SPECT systems a year and up to 10 cyclotrons accumulating isotopes.
The director is sure that this kind of production will find its consumer at the markets of Russia and abroad. The institute will compete with international companies by means of service maintenance best bid. This is what makes the NIIEFA strategy different from that of Siemens, for instance. The concern keeps its service prices high, with the cost reaching the tenth part from the installation value. Thus calling a team from Germany may cost EUR 100 000, while the cost of a device itself is about EUR 1 million. In Russia most of the health care systems are government-owned institutions with equipment financed from state budget and hospital simply cannot afford costs that high. “Our service is much cheaper. About 60 therapeutic accelerators by the NIIEFA are already working in different parts of the country, their service plan is set a long time ago”, – Tanaev said.
New Horizons
Oleg Filatov also told his guests about other promising directions: “We exportproducts, based on radiation technologies, and are looking forward to developing this line”. Medical equipment for sterilization is already being exported to the South Korea, Vietnam, Slovakia. Vietnam is currently studying nutrition objects processing options, some of the technologies raised interest in several countries of the CIS. There are preliminary agreements concerning development of nuclear radiation medicine with Ukraine, however to make it reala government-supported program is needed.
Radiation technologies may also be used in coal-fired power industry. “If we process exhausts with the help of our technology, we can get pure air and ash fertilizers”, – says Filatov. Those devices are already used abroad, in Poland and China, for example. Strict demands from the state make us develop these kinds of technologies. Again, in Russia all this is just about to be studied. However yet there is some success in the application sphere: the NIIEFA technologies are being used in aircraft engineering industry – for prolongation of operating life of turbine airfoils. “This equipment already can be found at the Chernyshev Moscow Machine Building Plant” – says Filatov.
