Of Interest archive

US Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana visited the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) on 14 June to learn about fusion research at MIT and the plight of MIT's tokamak, Alcator C-Mod.

That same day, PSFC Director Miklos Porkolab received a letter from the Department of Energy (DOE) informing him that its previous request for a "cold shutdown" of the C-Mod experimental facility be changed to a "warm shutdown" for the duration of fiscal year 2013. The change was in response to guidance DOE received from the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development as part of its fiscal year 2013 budget "reprogramming" activity.

The Center is exploring how best to prepare for retaining essential staff through the remainder of fiscal year 2013, with the prospect of possibly restarting operation of the fusion experiment in fiscal year 2014, should funds be appropriated by Congress.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/status-of-fusion-experiment-warms-up.html

Something of a sad moment for infrared astronomy has come with the death of the European Space Agency's powerful space telescope Herschel.   Vital helium coolant has already run out. And when its thrusters' fuel tanks are finally exhausted on Monday, the giant eye on the sky will be switched off for ever.   But the work of the hugely successful instrument, with its 3.5 metre mirror, nearly 2 million km from Earth in the depths of space, continue to bring exciting discoveries.   The latest to be revealed is that the amount of cool hydrogen gas within our Milky Way galaxy that forms a reservoir that will fuel new stars has been hugely underestimated.   Read more on Space News web site at: http://www.sen.com/news/dying-herschel-maps-fuel-for-new-stars.html

A power outage could leave Western nations without electricity for months in the event of a strong geomagnetic storm, a new report claims, adding that it is "almost inevitable in the future" while the sun is approaching the peak of its solar cycle.   It is a known fact that solar activity is interconnected with the our planet's geomagnetic fields that are known to affect life on Earth, including widespread electrical disruptions.  Currently the Sun's activity is ramping up toward what is known as solar maximum as the peak of the 11-year solar cycle is expected in 2015.   According to the report, produced by Lloyd's in cooperation with Atmospheric and Environmental research (AER), super solar storms normally occur approximately every 150 years, the last being the Carrington Event in 1859—a geomagnetic storm that caused disruptions in telegraph lines all over the world and the brightest auroras. However that was long before people were so dependent on electricity.   Read more on RT's web site at: http://rt.com/news/solar-storm-earth-electricity-391/

They seek one day to harness the same energy that powers the stars and thus to open the door to deep space exploration. Among the first goals of a spacecraft with such an engine would most possibly be human travel to Mars.   "Using existing rocket fuels, it's nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth," said lead researcher John Slough, a University of Washington research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics. "We are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace."   The project is funded through NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. Last month at a symposium, Slough and his team from MSNW, of which he is president, presented their mission analysis for a trip to Mars, along with detailed computer modeling and initial experimental results. Theirs was one of a handful of projects awarded a second round of funding last fall after already receiving phase-one money in a field of 15 projects chosen from more than 700 proposals.   Read more on the Daily Fusion website at: http://dailyfusion.net/2013/04/scientists-testing-nuclear-fusion-powered-rocket-engine-5042/#

It sounds like a kind of gothic torture—being put in a large bucket and lowered into a 9m-deep hole at the centre of a huge machine. But it's all in a day's work for JET's inspection team as part of maintenance of JET's central magnet, the P1 solenoid.

The solenoid itself is made up of 1,440 turns of copper, separated into 14 "pancakes"—sections of coils stacked on top of each other. During the course of experiments these carry up to 60,000 amps and are subjected to huge magnetic forces, which cause them to shift around slightly. A set of spring-loaded keys pull the pancakes back into alignment, but over the course of thousands of plasma pulses you would expect these to wear and lose their precision.

Read more on EFDA's website at: https://www.efda.org/2013/06/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-torus/

Warning that the world is not on track to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, the International Energy Agency (IEA) on 10 June urged governments to swiftly enact four energy policies that would keep climate goals alive without harming economic growth.
 
"Climate change has quite frankly slipped to the back burner of policy priorities. But the problem is not going away—quite the opposite," IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said in London at the launch of a World Energy Outlook Special Report, Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map, which highlights the need for intensive action before 2020.   Read the full article here: http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2013/june/name,38773,en.html  

JET turns 30 this year, but its smaller cousin Tore Supra, in France, is close behind, celebrating its 25th anniversary this month. Tore Supra was conceived even before JET's construction was complete with a view to surpassing JET's performance in specific areas—for example, pulse length. And 25 years on, Tore Supra continues to look forward, with big plans to line it with tungsten (atomic symbol W) and install a divertor in the WEST (W Environment in a Steady-state Tokamak) Project.   The great leap forward that Tore Supra incorporated was superconducting magnets. This enabled a much longer pulse length; indeed Tore Supra set the record for the longest pulse in a large tokamak (six minutes) in 2003. While this is an achievement in itself, it also provides a vital tool for testing materials in a sustained plasma discharge. In particular, Tore Supra has been instrumental in exploring the active cooling of materials that face the plasma. Although it turned out that building a water-cooling system robust enough to weather the harsh environment of a tokamak has been a challenge, the knowledge gained will be vital for the long pulses of ITER.   Read more on EFDA's website at: http://www.efda.org/2013/06/at-25-tore-supra-is-looking-westward/. 

The swan song of retiring Sandia physicist Tom Sanford is a technical, yet personal, memoir about experiments that changed the course of research at particle accelerators around the world.   His experiments in the mid-1990s made the Z accelerator a more effective candidate to achieve peacetime fusion energy—a goal still pursued by Z researchers today. Z also tests materials by subjecting them to the almost unimaginable conditions present in stars and nuclear weapons.   Sanford went on to share the 2005 Hannes Alfven Prize of the European Physical Society "for the remarkable achievements of the multi-filament Z-pinch development of recent years."   Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-06-high-impact-sandia-physicist-publishes-technical.html#jCp

Architect Rudy Ricciotti, who designed the ITER Hedaquarters in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, makes headlines as his latest creation, the Musée des civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée (MuCem) is inaugurated today in Marseille by French president François Hollande. The Museum will open to the public on 7 June. (Photo Lisa Ricciotti)   Read more here: http://www.france24.com/en/20130604-marseille%E2%80%99-mucem-offers-bridge-between-mediterranean-europe

Heinrich Rohrer, who shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing a microscope that made it possible to see individual atoms and move them around, an achievement that led to vastly faster computing and greatly advanced molecular biology, died on Thursday night or early Friday morning in Wollerau, Switzerland. He was 79.   Read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/science/heinrich-rohrer-physicist-who-won-nobel-dies-at-79.html?_r=1&    

The last open seam on the steel outer cover of the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device was closed last week. The core of the research device is thus ready as is its basic skeleton and it can go into operation at the Greifswald branch institute of Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) in 2014.   The objective of fusion research is to derive energy from fusion of atomic nuclei, just as happens in the sun. To ignite the fusion fire, the hydrogen plasma fuel in a future power plant has to be confined in magnetic fields and heated to temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees. Wendelstein 7-X, the world's largest fusion device of the stellarator type when completed, is intended to investigate the suitability of this configuration for a power plant. With 70 large superconducting magnet coils in continuous operation it is then to produce a highly stable and thermally insulating magnetic cage confining the plasma.   Read more on the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik (IPP) website at: http://www.ipp.mpg.de/ippcms/eng/presse/pi/05_13_pi.html