Of Interest archive

 

Princeton - Tucked away from major roadways and nestled amid more than 80 acres of forest sits a massive warehouse-like building where inside, a device that can produce temperatures hotter than the sun has sat cold and quiet for more than two years.   But the wait is almost over for the nuclear fusion reactor to get back up and running at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. "We're very excited and we're all anxious to turn that machine back on," said Adam Cohen, deputy director for operations at PPPL.   The National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) has been shut down since 2012 as it underwent a $94 million upgrade that will make it what officials say will be the most powerful fusion facility of its kind in the world. It is expected to be ready for operations in late winter or early spring, Cohen said.   Read more on the NJ.com website.

Four crates containing parts of an ITER electrical transformer (high voltage surge arresters) left the port of New York on 5 August; delivery to the ITER site in France is expected late September. The components were manufactured by ABB in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania.

​FOR years, scientists just down the road from Oxford have been quietly working at the forefront of a project that could change the world.

But fusion power is the best invention you have probably never heard of. That may sound like a bold claim, but Prof Steve Cowley, chief executive officer of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, is convinced that it is the only solution to a fast-approacing world energy crisis. He has been working at the science centre since 2008, but the project — the Joint European Torus (JET) — has been under way since 1982. Its aim: to create the conditions of a star on the Earth, producing clean, cheap energy for us to power our televisions, kettles and lightbulbs. Read more on the Oxford Mail website.

​Culham Center for Fusion Energy, in a consortium with UK universities and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, is developing a concept for a large neutron source to test materials for future fusion power plants including the proposed prototype, DEMO, that will follow the ITER project.

If approved, the FAFNIR project would give the designers of DEMO crucial data on materials with which to build the machine. It would also serve as a bridge to the planned International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF), which is expected to play a similar role for the first generation of commercial fusion reactors. Fusion scientists and engineers are increasingly focusing on materials research as attention turns to designs for reactors that will put power on the electricity grid. The extremely fast neutrons produced by fusion reactions in tokamaks carry an energy of 14 million electron volts (MeV) — about 70 times more than photons in hospital x-ray equipment — and pose a threat to the tokamak's structures. The neutrons cause damage within the structure of the material which leads to swelling through the creation of voids. Effects such as embrittlement and hardening of the metal caused by accumulation of helium and hydrogen gases produced by transmutation (transformation of one element into another) mean that special materials must be developed that can stay the course throughout the reactor's lifespan. As a result of transmutations caused by the neutrons, radioactive elements are produced within the tokamak components, so choosing materials that will shed their radioactivity quickly is another priority for safe decommissioning.   Read more on CCFE web site.

​Last week the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology's Subcommittee on Energy held a hearing to discuss the progress and future of the ITER international fusion project.

¶

When Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) delivered her opening statement, she affirmed her confidence in Nuclear Fusion. "Nuclear Fusion has the potential to provide the world with clean safe and practically inexhaustible source of energy. Producing reliable electric power from fusion would undoubtedly serve as one of the biggest  and most important scientific achievements on the history of mankind''.

She also confirmed her support in the ITER Project: ''That is why I am so supportive of a strong research program that can help us overcome the remaining scientific and engineering challenges for this potential to become a reality. The ITER project is the next and largest step towards this goal''.

¶

¶

Listen to this statement here.

​Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) found a way to compress a diamond, mimicking conditions in the cores of planets like Jupiter and Saturn.

Working alongside researchers from the Princeton University and University of California, Berkeley, LLNL scientists used the world's largest laser known as the U.S. National Ignition Facility (NIF) to achieve what they set out to do. Actually, it was 176 lasers coming together as one to compress a diamond to 50 million times the atmospheric pressure of the Earth or 14 times of the planet's core. The air above you is equivalent to one atmosphere. The NIF has a total of 192 lasers.

Diamonds are chosen for the experiment because these are made from carbon and carbon is the fourth most abundant of the elements in the universe. They are the hardest material known to man but it took no more than 10 billionths of a second to vaporize a piece with the help of the NIF. Despite the lack of an end-product that can be further observed, the experiment is helpful because it has shown that it is possible to study the behavior of planets rich in carbon, as well as stars and exoplanets beyond the Milky Way.

"The experimental techniques developed here provide a new capability to experimentally reproduce pressure-temperature conditions deep in planetary interiors," said LLNL physicist and lead author for the study, Ray Smith.

Read more on Techtimes ​website. 

​There is a mantra in the fund-raising world: big donors like to support big ideas. And ideas do not come much larger than at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland. Now the organization — which uses its particle smasher to probe the fundamental structure of the Universe — has registered a charitable foundation to raise funds for its educational, technology-transfer and arts activities.

CERN is not the only big institution to go after donations to fund projects that fall outside the core research remit. The trend is on the rise among large European research organizations. The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, is shifting its fund-raising focus from industry sponsorship to private donations. And ITER, the international nuclear-fusion experiment being built in Cadarache, France, is devising a way to deal with the offers of donations that it already receives. What nobody yet knows is the fruit these efforts will bear — whether individuals really want to donate heftily to scientific charities that are not focused on medical solutions.

For CERN, there is no better time to form a charitable foundation, says Matteo Castoldi, head of its development office. CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and the discovery of the Higgs boson, has "captured the public imagination" as much as the Apollo missions did in the 1960s, he says. The organization is already taking advantage of this, "but there is much more we could do, and that's where the foundation comes in".
(...)

CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer stresses that such funding will not replace the institute's core budget, paid for by member states. Instead, the proceeds are aimed at activities that this funding cannot stretch to: school projects, the development of medical spin-offs such as proton therapy (the use of proton beams to kill cancer cells), and meeting the huge demand for general-interest and science-related visits. But if a donor has an explicit desire for their gift to go towards research, CERN would consider this, adds Heuer.​

Read the full article on the Nature website.

​The National Fusion Research Institute of Korea has just published the latest issue of their magazine Fusion Now, with a long article on the ITER International Business Forum that brought together 220 industrial participants in Seoul on 2-4 July.

A new video released this month by the European Domestic Agency takes us to the heart of the toroidal field coil manufacturing process. At the ASG Superconductor facility in La Spezia, Italy, a prototype double pancake—the building block of the seven-layer toroidal field coils—has now been through all of the stages of manufacturing, from winding to laser welding. The camera guides us all along the process, from station to station, with close up shots of the technologies involved.   You can view the video here or visit the European Domestic Agency website for more information.

​On 1 July 2014 Hiroshi Shirai took over from Shinichi Ishida as project leader of the Satellite Tokamak Programme project in Japan—JT-60SA. 

As a project conducted under the Broader Approach Agreement between Europe and Japan, the Satellite Tokamak Programme is upgrading the JT-60U tokamak in Naka, Japan to the advanced superconducting tokamak JT-60SA, re-employing the site buildings, auxiliaries, neutral beams, and some power supplies to support the exploitation of ITER and to promote research and development towards the next-stage device, DEMO.

Hiroshi Shirai was the group leader of the ITER Project Promotion Group in the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) Tokyo office from 2007 to March 2014. In 2012 and 2013 he was the chairman of the ITER Council Preparatory Working Group (CPWG) and also took on the role of Broader Approach Steering Committee Secretariat from June 2007 to October 2011.

Trained as a theoretical plasma physicist, he has been away from Naka for more than ten years. "Some aspects of R&D activities have changed significantly during this period: JT-60 was shut down and dismantled, and then the JT-60SA project started up quickly and is now in the assembly phase. I will have to catch up with the ongoing activities here in a short time. Thanks to the assistance of the Project Team members I am accommodating myself to the new work environment. Coordinating to keep the schedule of this project is quite a demanding task, but the Project Team and I are dedicated to fulfilling our responsibilities."

Shinichi Ishida, JT-60SA project leader since 2007, recalled on his departure the problems of the early years "The project had developed significant problems in terms of cost, schedule, performance and management due to very limited human resources. But we achieved a consensus that only a clear and common mission could hold an organization together as a single team and enable it to produce results." During his time in office the project placed almost all the procurement arrangements of JT-60SA. Mr Ishida will continue to support the project from his new role at the JAEA Naka site in coordination for the management of fusion R&D, including the ITER Project and Broader Approach activities.

For more information, please see the JT-60SA newsletter.

​On Friday 11 July, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology's Subcommittee on Energy held a hearing to discuss the progress and future of the ITER international fusion project. The US joined the European Union (EU), India, Japan, China, Korea, and Russia to form the ITER Organization, with each country providing resources, personnel, and expertise to move the project forward.

Ranking Member Eric Swalwell (D-CA) of the Energy Subcommittee said in his opening statement, "Given the critical importance of ITER to determining the viability of fusion as a clean energy source, and the major contributions of US researchers to advancing the science and engineering of the field to this point, I maintain strong support for this project along with the other key components of the broader US-based fusion research program. However, this does not mean we can support an unconditional blank check. The US must maintain vigorous oversight and use every means available with our international partners to contain cost and schedule, all while keeping an unwavering focus on achieving the project's incredibly important goals for our and the world's energy future."

Read more here.