Of Interest archive

​For the third consecutive year, young scientists involved with ITER Project implementation from Russia's major research centres were invited to the Russian Domestic Agency in the framework of the 57th Scientific Conference of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT).

Academician Evgeny Velikhov, ITER Council member and president of the Kurchatov Institute, gave the opening, stressing that "ITER is not only a scientific facility; it is also a technological platform that will provide the basis for fusion energy in the future."

Participants heard reports on R&D and manufacturing progress for ITER key components, including diagnostic systems (Budker Institute, Novosibirsk; MIPT, Dolgoprudnyj; TRINITI, Troitsk; Kurchatov Institute, Moscow), blanket modules (Efremov Institute, Saint Petersburg; Dollezhal Institute, Moscow), and high-temperature testing of in-vessel components (Efremov Institute, Saint Petersburg; MEPhI, Moscow).

Evgeny Velikhov concluded the conference by expressing confidence that "sooner or later humanity will certainly come to fusion."

 

​Science writer Daniel Clery visited the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) recently to talk about his book on the history of fusion, A Piece of the Sun.

The book tells the story of the quest for fusion energy, from the discovery of nuclear fusion as the Sun's power source in the early 20th century through to the latest advances in magnetic and laser fusion research as the glittering prize of near-endless energy gets closer. It is a compelling account of the ups and downs of the research, the events and personalities involved, and the science of fusion. Daniel gave a lecture at CCFE on the "Many Faces of Fusion," based on the book. View the conference and interview on the CCFE website.

​Editors of Foreign Policy magazine have named fusion physicist Rob Goldston, a Princeton University professor of astrophysical sciences and former director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), to its list of "100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2014." The recognition, made 17 November at a celebration in Washington, D.C., honoured Goldston for his contributions to the field of nuclear arms control.

Founded in 1970, Foreign Policy focuses on global affairs, current events and domestic and international affairs. It produces daily content on its website, ForeignPolicy.com and publishes six print issues annually.

Named with Goldston were Princeton physicist Alex Glaser and Boaz Barak of Microsoft Research New England. The researchers have designed a novel process called a "zero-knowledge protocol" for verifying that nuclear weapons to be dismantled or removed from deployment contain true warheads. Goldston and Glaser are developing a prototype system at PPPL that will test the idea by beaming neutrons at a non-nuclear test object.

 

Photo: Alex Glaser, left, and Rob Goldston, seen here with a non-nuclear test object.

 

Read more on the PPPL website.

​Studying the intricacies and mysteries of the sun is physicist Wendell Horton life's work. A widely known authority on plasma physics, his study of the high temperature gases on the sun, or plasma, consistently leads him around the world to work on a diverse range of projects that have great impact.

Fusion energy is one such key scientific issue that Horton is investigating and one that has intrigued researchers for decades.

[...]   Through the Institute for Fusion Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, Horton collaborates with researchers at ITER, a fusion lab in France and the National Institute for Fusion Science in Japan to address these challenges. At ITER, Horton is working with researchers to build the world's largest tokamak—the device that is leading the way to produce fusion energy in the laboratory.   Perfecting the design of the tokamak is essential to producing fusion energy, and since it is not fully developed, Horton performs supercomputer simulations on the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to model plasma flow and turbulence inside the device.   "Simulations give us information about plasma in three dimensions and in time, so that we are able to see details beyond what we would get with analytic theory and probes and high-tech diagnostic measurements," Horton said.   The simulations also give researchers a more holistic picture of what is needed to improve the tokamak design. Comparing simulations with fusion experiments in nuclear labs around the world helps Horton and other researchers move even closer to this breakthrough energy source.

Read the full article on PhysOrg. 

The November issue of the US ITER News Update is available on line.

It includes a full review of the status of US procurement for ITER and excerpts from the July 2014 Statement of Ned Sauthoff, director of the US ITER Project Office, before the Subcommittee on Energy, Committee on Science, Space and Technology at the US House of Representatives.

​FuseNet, the European platform to coordinate and improve fusion education, has launched a new student support scheme in cooperation with and funded by the EUROfusion consortium:

- Support for Master students to go abroad for an internship in a fusion group or at a research institute. - Support for Master and PhD students to follow educational training activities external to their own organisation (such as summer schools, master classes and workshops with a dominant educational character). - Support for PhD students to take part in research at another universities' fusion group or at a research laboratory for shorter periods than a full internship. Being a member of FuseNet, the ITER Organization is entitled to make use of this very attractive scheme by offering internships at ITER or research trips for PhD students. For more information please check the FuseNet website.  

​On Friday 14 November, the first Highly Exceptional Load (HEL) destined to the ITER site was loaded onto the container ship CMA-Ivanhoe in the port of Busan, South Korea, to begin its five-week journey to France.

On board is the 87-ton main body of one high voltage substation transformer unit (part of the ITER steady state electrical network) as well as 39 wooden crates packed with the transformer's auxiliary components. The equipment was procured by the US and manufactured by Hyundai Heavy Industry in Ulsan, South Korea. Three identical transformers will be shipped to ITER in the coming months.   Ivanhoe should reach the Mediterranean harbour of Fos-sur-Mer on 19 December. There, the transformer main body will be unloaded and staged until 9 January 2015, when it will be transferred to a trailer.   The trailer will be loaded onto a barge to cross the inland sea Étang-de-Berre before travelling 104 kilometres along the ITER Itinerary, for delivery to  the ITER site in the early hours of 14 January.

​Some 135 researchers, graduate students, and staff members from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL, US)) joined 1,500 research scientists from around the world at the 56th annual meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics Conference from 27 to 31 October in New Orleans.

Topics in the sessions ranged from waves in plasma to the physics of ITER and women in plasma physics. Dozens of PPPL scientists presented the results of their cutting-edge research in magnetic fusion and plasma science. There were about 100 invited speakers at the conference, more than a dozen of whom were from PPPL.

Read the full article and access the topical press releases on the PPPL website.

​With near-surgical precision, technicians at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL, US) hoisted the 29,000-pound (13,000-kilo) centre stack for the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade, NSTX-U, over a 20-foot (6-metre) wall and lowered it into the vacuum vessel of the fusion facility. The smooth operation on 24 October capped more than two years of construction of the centre stack, which houses the bundle of magnetic coils that form the heart of the $94 million (EUR 19 million) upgrade.

"This was really a watershed moment," said Mike Williams, the head of engineering and infrastructure at PPPL and associate director of the Laboratory. "The critical path [or key sequence of steps for the upgrade] was fabrication of the magnets, and that has now been done."

The lift team conducted the final steps largely in silence, attaching the bundled coils in their casing to an overhead crane and guiding the 21 foot-long (6.4-metre) centre stack into place. The clearances were tiny: the bottom of the casing passed just inches over the shielding wall and the top of the vacuum vessel. Inserting the centre stack into the vessel was like threading a needle, since the clearance at the opening was only about an inch. Guidance came chiefly from hand signals, with some radio communication at the end. Read the full article on the PPPL website.

​Wildlife is thriving on the ITER site. Wild boars, mouflon goats and deer freely roam the vast expanses of forest that surround the installation.

This picture of two young does was taken last week by APAVE's Health and Safety Coordinator Laurent Feron, as he drove along the track leading to the Logistics Platform located behind the hill on the east side of the worksite.

These does are no ordinary animals — they are descendants of the two pairs of Sikka deer that were offered to French President Sadi Carnot by the Emperor of Japan Mutsuhito, the "Meiji Emperor", in 1890. The two couples were originally hosted in the Presidential Hunting Reserve near Paris. By 1928, the original four had become a small herd, and a few individuals were entrusted to various national parks and wildlife reservations. The National Forest in Cadarache was one of them. Eighty-six years later, the Emperor's deer are still here, scattered between the CEA-Cadarache enclosure, the National Forestry Commission reserve and the outskirts of the ITER site.  

​From 20-22 May 2015 the ENERGY, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Conference and Exhibition (EST-Energy) will be taking place at the Karlsruhe Convention Center in Germany.

The conference will focus on all energy-related topics with an emphasis on renewable and CO2-free forms of energy.

The establishment of a sustainable, reliable and achievable energy system needs a worldwide cross-linked effort. Research, development and implementation of innovations by both the scientific community as well as industry is necessary. EST-Energy 2015 aims to provide a platform for the most recent research findings and allow participants to network with other researchers and engineers from all over the world.

Fusion is one of the themes of the conference. A call for abstracts has been launched for topics that fall in the following categories: ITER- and DEMO-related issues, the development strategies of new fusion devices (W7-X, JT-60 SA... ), and technical issues that may be of interest to others.

The deadline for paper abstracts is 15 December 2014. All information can be found on the conference website.

​Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers, in collaboration with General Atomics and the University of Arizona, have developed an infrared and visible camera viewing system that's able to produce wide-angle, tangential views of full poloidal (north-south direction of the magnetic field) cross-sections inside the tokamak. The camera's images provide researchers with data about the interior conditions of the DIII-D, which was built under contract for the US Department of Energy.

"We wanted to look inside the tokamak's chamber to see where things were heating up on the walls," said Kevin Morris, a designer with LLNL's National Security Engineer Division, who was part of the research team that developed the camera system. "There are a lot of critical areas that are heated by the plasma, and researchers want to understand them better."   ... The camera system consists of a commercially available infrared camera, a fast visible camera and an optical system designed by a collaboration of physicists, engineers, optical designers and mechanical designers.   Their design will be used as a prototype for a set of larger cameras that will be built for ITER.

Read the full story on the LLNL website here.

​Melvyn Bragg from "In Our Time" and his guests discuss nuclear fusion, the process that powers stars. In the 1920s physicists predicted that it might be possible to generate huge amounts of energy by fusing atomic nuclei together, a reaction requiring enormous temperatures and pressures. Today we know that this complex reaction is what keeps the Sun shining. Scientists have achieved fusion in the laboratory and in nuclear weapons; today it is seen as a likely future source of limitless and clean energy.

Guests:

Philippa Browning, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester

Steve Cowley, Chief Executive of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority

Justin Wark, Professor of Physics and fellow of Trinity College at the University of Oxford

Producer: Thomas Morris.

 

Listen to the 43-minute program that aired on 30 October 2014 (9:30 p.m.) here.

​Where else would you like to study fusion science and engineering but in the heart of the Eternal City?

The second oldest public university in Rome, the University of Rome "Tor Vergata," has offered a Second Level Master course in Fusion Energy Science and Engineering since 2012. Open to postgraduates with a Master's degree or equivalent title, the course aims to train experts in the areas of machine operation, experimental practice both in magnetic confinement and inertial fusion, and fusion technology and engineering.

The next course starts on 2 February 2015. The duration of the course is one academic year but it can be extended to two academic years according to individual study plans. Enrolment is open now. For more information, see the dedicated website, or contact: Dr. Colomba Russo Phone: +390672597201 Mail: @email

The latest issue of the European Domestic Agency's newsletter, F4ENews, has just been released. You can consult it here.

​Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Germany have devised a new method for minimizing turbulence in bumpy donut-shaped experimental fusion facilities called stellarators. This month in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, these authors describe an advanced application of the method that could help physicists overcome a major barrier to the production of fusion energy in such devices, and could also apply to their more widely used symmetrical donut-shaped cousins called tokamaks. This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

Turbulence allows the hot, charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions to escape from the magnetic fields that confine the gas in stellarators and tokamaks. This turbulent transport occurs at comparable levels in both devices, and has long been recognized as a challenge for both in producing fusion power economically.   "Confinement bears directly on the cost of fusion energy," said physicist Harry Mynick, a PPPL coauthor of the paper, "and we're finding how to reshape the plasma to enhance confinement."   The new method uses two types of advanced computer codes that have only recently become available. The authors modified these codes to address turbulent transport, evolving the starting design of a fusion device into one with reduced levels of turbulence. The current paper applies the new method to the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, soon to be the world's largest when construction is completed in Greifswald, Germany.   Results of the new method, which has also been successfully applied to the design of smaller stellarators and tokamaks, suggest how reshaping the plasma in a fusion device could produce much better confinement. Equivalently, improved plasma shaping could produce comparable confinement with reduced magnetic field strength or reduced facility size, with corresponding reductions in the cost of construction and operation.  

Read the full report on the PPPL website.

-- Magnetic field strength in a turbulence-optimized stellarator design. Regions with the highest strength are shown in yellow.

 

​Recent fusion experiments on the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics (California, US) and the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at MIT (Massachusetts, US), show that beaming microwaves into the centre of the plasma can be used to control the density in the centre of the plasma, where a fusion reactor would produce most of its power. Several megawatts of microwaves mimic the way fusion reactions would supply heat to plasma electrons to keep the "fusion burn" going.

The new experiments reveal that turbulent density fluctuations in the inner core intensify when most of the heat goes to electrons instead of plasma ions, as would happen in the center of a self-sustaining fusion reaction. Supercomputer simulations closely reproduce the experiments, showing that the electrons become more turbulent as they are more strongly heated, and this transports both particles and heat out of the plasma.   "We are beginning to uncover the fundamental mechanisms that control the density, under conditions relevant to a real fusion reactor," says Dr. Darin Ernst, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who led the experiments and simulations, together with co-leaders Dr. Keith Burrell (General Atomics), Dr. Walter Guttenfelder (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory), and Dr. Terry Rhodes (UCLA).   Read the full report on Science Daily.     --Supercomputer simulation shows turbulent density fluctuations in the core of the Alcator C-Mod tokamak during strong electron heating. Credit: D. R. Ernst, MIT

​In order to improve project performance and in light of the ITER Project's specific managerial and cultural complexities, an External Management Advisory Board (EMAB) was established earlier this year. This week, the members of the EMAB convened for their first meeting at ITER Headquarters.

The objective of the EMAB is to advise the ITER Organization's senior managers and the Director-General on enhancing project and safety culture, a challenging activity in the context of a mega international project with seven Members. Also, the Board is charged with assessing the practical implementation of the set of actions that was decided in response to the Management Assessment carried out in 2013.

The Chair of this new entity is Jean Jacquinot, who also serves as scientific advisor to the Chairman of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Bernard Bigot.

Other Board members are Michael Tendler, professor at Sweden's Alfvén Laboratory (Royal Institute of Technology); Richard Hawryluk, head of the department of ITER and Tokamaks at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (US); Dhiraj Bora, director of the Institute for Plasma Research, IPR (India); and Yuanxi Wan, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and former Chairman of the ITER Science and Technology Advisory Committee (STAC). ITER's Colette Ricketts, of the System Management Section, is in charge of the secretariat.

"During our first meeting held on 20-21 October, we had a very fruitful discussion," the Board members reported after the first meeting. "We openly addressed issues such as the project's nuclear and safety culture, options for improved alignment between the ITER Organization and the Domestic Agencies, and last but not least the creation of the ITER Chief Executive Team, (ICET), formed to improve collaboration between all actors of the ITER Project."

The Board will continue to address key ITER management issues at its next meeting, scheduled for 11-12 December 2014.

​Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is organizing a colloquium on TFTR  record fusion power shot of December 1993.

More information here.

​Research by an international team led by SLAC and Stanford scientists has uncovered a new, unpredicted behavior in a copper oxide material that becomes superconducting — conducting electricity without any loss — at relatively high temperatures.

This new phenomenon — an unforeseen collective motion of electric charges coursing through the material — presents a challenge to scientists seeking to understand its origin and connection with high-temperature superconductivity. Their ultimate goal is to design a superconducting material that works at room temperature.   "Making a room-temperature superconductor would save the world enormous amounts of energy," said Thomas Devereaux, leader of the research team and director of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), which is jointly run with SLAC. "But to do that we must understand what's happening inside the materials as they become superconducting. This result adds a new piece to this long-standing puzzle."   The results were published 19 October in Nature Physics.

 

Read the full article on the SLAC website.