Of Interest archive

​By Raphael Rosen

Scientists from General Atomics and the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have discovered a phenomenon that helps them to improve fusion plasmas, a finding that may quicken the development of fusion energy.

Together with a team of researchers from across the United States, the scientists found that when they injected tiny grains of lithium into a plasma undergoing a particular kind of turbulence then, under the right conditions, the temperature and pressure rose dramatically. High heat and pressure are crucial to fusion, a process in which atomic nuclei — or ions — smash together and release energy — making even a brief rise in pressure of great importance for the development of fusion energy.

"These findings might be a step towards creating our ultimate goal of steady-state fusion, which would last not just for milliseconds, but indefinitely," said Tom Osborne, a physicist at General Atomics and lead author of the paper. This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

 Left: DIII-D tokamak. Right: Cross-section of plasma in which lithium has turned the emitted light green. (Credits: Left, General Atomics / Right, Steve Allen, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Read the whole article on the PPPL website.

​The ITER Commission locale d'information (the citizen watchdog group that monitors ITER activities in accordance with the French 2006 Transparency and Nuclear Safety Act) held its plenary session in the ITER Council chamber on 18 May.

The session provided ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot with an opportunity to present his Action Plan and develop his vision for the future of the project. "You are a very important body because you are conveying to us the preoccupations of the local populations regarding the ITER Project," he said to the assembled CLI members. "We need to have a confident relationship and I am open to any question and debate."

Physicist Luis Delgado-Aparicio, of the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), has won a highly competitive Early Career Research award sponsored by the DOE's Office of Science. The five-year grant of some $2.6 million will fund Delgado-Aparicio's research aimed at eliminating a key barrier to developing fusion power as a safe, clean and abundant source of electric energy.   Delgado-Aparicio's research focuses on the impurities that migrate from the interior walls and plasma-facing components of a fusion facility—or tokamak—into the plasma. These impurities are tiny particles that can cool the plasma and halt or slow the fusion reaction. Delgado-Aparicio is developing a process to enable researchers to pinpoint and analyze the impurities and quickly flush them out of the plasma.   Ridding plasmas of these impurities is becoming increasingly vital as experiments utilize longer pulses to produce more sustained fusion energy.   Read the full story on the PPPL website.

Applications for the 3rd edition of the doctoral program in plasma science and engineering APPLAuSE (Portugal) are now open for the course starting in February 2016.

The aim of the four-year program is to provide each student with broad knowledge in the field of plasma science and engineering by promoting close interaction with renowned specialists. It consists in a student-centred and highly modular PhD program designed to enhance each student's capabilities and maximize his/her potential in a chosen area of specialization.

The course language is English. Find out more on the host institution website: IPFN (Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear) or at APPLAuSE. 

Applications close on Sunday 7 June.

Three high voltage transformers for ITER's steady state electrical system have been loaded onto transport trailers in the Mediterranean port of Fos-sur-Mer and are ready for delivery to ITER.

Procured by the US Domestic Agency for ITER, the 87-ton transformers and their transport vehicles will cross the inland sea Etang de Berre by barge before travelling the 104 kilometres of the ITER Itinerary in one night, for arrival on 21 May.   Four identical transformer units (one was delivered to ITER in January) will serve to connect the ITER site's 400kV Prionnet substation, operated by the French operator RTE, to the ITER steady state electrical system AC distribution system.    Before the end of the month, two of the four units will be installed in their definitive location on the ITER construction site.

​The Conseil général, the executive body of the French départements recently had their name changes to Conseil départemental. In Bouches-du-Rhône, the département that is home to ITER, this change in name was accompanied by a change in president.

Since 2 April and for the first time in 225 years, a woman, Martine Vassal from Marseille, sits in the presidential seat. On 6 May, she paid an official visit to ITER in order to reaffirm the département's support to the project (Bouches-du-Rhône contributes 152 million EUR to ITER).   "We are committed to ITER and determined to stand along with you in this great venture", she said to ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot before taking a tour of the construction site. President Vassal with Vice-President Gazay (centre) and DG Bigot on the ITER site.

​View this spectacular video of the ITER site seen from a drone's point of view. (Produced in April by the European Domestic Agency.)

​In this new video the European agency for ITER Fusion for Energy recaps the main progress achieved in ITER construction in 2014 and presents the activities for the year ahead.

"2015 is the year of construction," says Romaric Darbour, F4E's Deputy Project Manager. "The works for ten new buildings or facilities will start, including the cryoplant, buildings for magnet power conversion and radio frequency heating, the cooling towers; cleaning facilities and the control building. The construction of the second floor of the Tokamak Building is also expected to begin this summer."

​The April issue of the WEST Newsletter (09) can be downloaded here.

The 2nd WEST Governing Board took place on March 5, 2015. WEST international partners have come from China, Europe, India, Japan, Korea and USA to share the progress on the project, joining efforts to achieve the common objective : first plasma in 2016.

Series production launched for complementary divertor components. In addition to the ITER-like prototypes to be tested in WEST, the divertor is constituted of complementary elements based on alternative technologies. The series production of these key plasma-facing components has been launched.

New European partners for WEST. On March 4, 2015, two European laboratories, KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) and IPP.CR (Institute of Plasma Physics, Czech Republic) signed a Letter Of Intent to join the collaboration on the WEST project.

​

Anne White has always relished challenges. As an undergraduate, she was fascinated by fluid dynamics, and the prospect of nuclear fusion as a game-changing energy source. She followed those passions to her current position as the Cecil and Ida Green Associate Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, where she spends much of her time studying plasma turbulence — which is a challenge unto itself. "I like it because it's really difficult," she says. "You take fluid turbulence and add electrical and magnetic fields, which make it even harder to understand. Then you heat it to 100 million degrees and have to figure out ways to measure it and see what it's doing. That's why I'm at home here at MIT — everyone's really excited about tough things."

Read more on the MIT News webpage.

Same component, same origin, same route: the second of four high voltage transformers procured by the US and manufactured in Korea reached Marseille's industrial port (Fos-sur-Mer) on Sunday 19 April.

The 87-ton component was unloaded the following morning and placed in storage, where it will remain until the last two transformers reach Fos (delivery expected around 10 May).

On the ITER platform, near the 400 kV switchyard, workers are putting the finishing touches to the large concrete pit that will host the first transformer, which should be operational in the early months of 2016.

Connected to the switchyard, it will bring down the voltage to 22 kV and dispatch power to the various plant systems of the installation.

 

​An important milestone has been reached on the MAST-Upgrade project, with the re-installation of four of the largest magnetic coils inside the machine.

Many of the internal poloidal field magnetic coils are new, especially around the upper and lower parts of the device. Only four coils in MAST-Upgrade remain from the original MAST experiment — the large mid-plane P4 and P5 (upper and lower) coils.

But it was not as simple as just leaving them in the vessel — they were removed with all the other internal equipment to enable the interior to be fully stripped down and cleaned. The coils were also comprehensively cleaned, including a hydroblast pressure wash. The P5 coils were then fitted with new flux loops.

Prior to re-installation, a full spatial survey of the vessel and coil supports and indeed of the shape of the coils themselves was undertaken. All four cleaned and surveyed coils were re-installed a few weeks ahead of schedule, on new strengthened coil supports inside the MAST-U vessel. A final survey indicated they were within 0.5mm of their optimum position — minimizing any stray fields when operations commence.

Coil re-installation is an important step, marking in many ways the beginning of the rebuild of the tokamak.

​The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is presenting the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on plasma physics and its applications, including fusion energy, astrophysical and space plasmas, societal and industrial applications. Enroll now !

A team including Prof. A. Fasoli, Prof. P. Ricci and colleagues at the Plasma Physics Research Center (CRPP) of EPFL, recorded the first MOOC on the basics of plasma physics and its main applications. Current titles include:
• Basics of plasma physics
• Basics of space plasmas in astrophysics
• Industrial and medical applications of plasmas
• Basics of fusion as a sustainable energy
• Advanced concepts in fusion such as magnetic confinement, plasma heating and energy extraction. Classes start on 1 May 2015. The course is given in English and will last nine weeks. Register or get more information here or view the course introduction on YouTube.

​The mission of the JT-60SA tokamak (based in Naka, Japan, and financed jointly by Europe and Japan) is to contribute to the early realization of fusion energy by addressing key physics issues for ITER and DEMO. It is a fully superconducting tokamak capable of confining high-temperature (100 million degree) deuterium plasmas, equivalent to achieving plasma energy balance if 50/50 deuterium/tritium were used. It is designed to help optimise the plasma configurations for ITER and DEMO, and has a large amount of power available for plasma heating and current drive, from both positive and negative ion neutral beams, as well as electron cyclotron resonance radio-frequency heating. The machine will be able to explore full non-inductive steady-state operation.

More news in the March issue of the JT-60 SA newsletter.

Lawrence Livermore Lab physicist Richard "Dick" Post, the "father of the modern flywheel" who worked at the lab for 63 years, died Tuesday night following a short illness, lab officials said. He was 96.   Post joined the Livermore lab in 1952, just months after it opened. He researched magnetic fusion energy alongside luminaries such as physicists Herb York, the lab's first director, and Edward Teller, "the father of the hydrogen bomb."   Post retired in 1994, but continued to work, driving himself to the lab four days a week to research various projects, including his flywheel battery. He worked until the last week of his life.  

Read more here​.

​In its April issue, the newsletter from the Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP) focuses on KTX, the reverse pinch machine that came into existence on 30 March. The mission of KTX is to explore the plasma profiles of future commercial fusion reactors. "KTX will produce its first plasma in June," says Pr. Liu Wandong, chief engineering director and dean of the Modern Physics Department at University of Science and Technology of China.

Read more in the _Do_KTX.pdf_DoX_April issue _Dx_of the ASIPP Newsletter.

​The 12th Workshop on Beryllium Technology will be held from 10 to 12 September 2015 on Jeju Island, South Korea. The objective of this workshop is to disseminate results of research and technology development in areas relevant to beryllium utilization in nuclear power systems, both fission and fusion.   Click _Do_BeWS-12.pdf_DoX_ here_Dx_ for more information on the program.  

​After two years of intense maintenance and consolidation, and several months of preparation for restart, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is back in operation. On 5 April at 10:41 a.m., a proton beam was back in the 27-kilometre ring, followed at 12:27 p.m. by a second beam rotating in the opposite direction. These beams circulated at their injection energy of 450 GeV. Over the coming days, operators will check all systems before increasing energy of the beams.

"Operating accelerators for the benefit of the physics community is what CERN's here for," said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer. "Today, CERN's heart beats once more to the rhythm of the LHC."  

"The return of beams to the LHC rewards a lot of intense, hard work from many teams of people," said the head of CERN's Beam Department, Paul Collier. "It's very satisfying for our operators to be back in the driver's seat, with what's effectively a new accelerator to bring on-stream, carefully, step by step."

The technical stop of the LHC was a Herculean task. Some 10,000 electrical interconnections between the magnets were consolidated. Magnet protection systems were added, while cryogenic, vacuum and electronics were improved and strengthened. Furthermore, the beams will be set up in such a way that they will produce more collisions by bunching protons closer together, with the time separating bunches being reduced from 50 nanoseconds to 25 nanoseconds.

Read more on the CERN website.

By Raphael Rosen, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS), a set of four spacecraft that will study the magnetic fields surrounding Earth, may employ data provided by Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), which operates the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX)—the world's leading laboratory facility for studying reconnection. Results of the MRX research could elucidate the space probes' findings, said Masaaki Yamada, principal investigator of the MRX project.

Reconnection takes place when the magnetic field lines in plasma merge and snap apart with violent force. But NASA is flying blind in a sense when seeking such events, since mission operators don't know precisely where reconnection will occur in space or what the data it produces will look like. And since the explosive events occur in milliseconds, the MMS craft, orbiting in tight formation at an average speed of some 20,000 miles per hour, will have only fleeting moments to detect and measure the phenomena.

The MRX data could facilitate such detection. Comparing the data with signals from space will enable instruments aboard the craft to spot actual instances of reconnection taking place.

Read more on the PPPL website.

​When ITER scientists needed to simulate how particles travel and transport radiation in the ITER machine, they bought time in one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe: Mare Nostrum, the flagship machine of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC).

The collaboration with the Spanish public institution, whose 10th anniversary was celebrated on 1 April, has now shifted to simulation studies of ELM control techniques — another field of study that requires crunching huge quantities of numbers.

High performance computing has become essential to the progress of science and technology. With close to 50,000 processors and a computing power of one thousand billion operations per second, Mare Nostrum has contributed to establishing three-dimensional maps of the galaxy, mathematical models of the expansion rate of the Universe, the sequencing of the human genome...

In a video address to the participants of the 10th anniversary ceremony, ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot stressed the importance of BSC's contribution to ITER.

ITER and the Spanish institution have crossed ways many times: former ITER Deputy-Director Carlos Alejaldre was part of BSC's executive board in the mid-2000s and, more recently, one of the ITER Monaco Postdoctoral Fellows joined BSC's computational physics group, bringing with him the valuable experience he gained while at ITER.