Of Interest archive

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

Friday 17 May was Fusion Day at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL. On the program: a conference to discuss the progress that is being made in fusion across the world, the roadmaps to the production of electricity from fusion, and a presentation on ITER.

Through its Center for Plasma Physics Research (CRPP), EPFL has made significant contributions to fusion research and is now a key member of the international fusion energy community.

Read more about the day's events here: http://actu.epfl.ch/news/epfl-fusion-day/

The plan to shut down a nuclear fusion experiment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a year and news that half the project's employees have received layoff notices has prompted objections from the state's two senators.   On Monday, U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and William M. Cowan wrote a letter to Ernest Moniz, the MIT physicist who has just been confirmed as the secretary of the Department of Energy, urging him to restore funding to the experiment.   "We were troubled to learn that last week, as a result of budget uncertainty, MIT issued Reduction in Force notices to 35 scientists, engineers and technicians at the Alcator C-Mod facility," the senators wrote. "We are concerned that failing to provide funding for the facility will threaten American leadership in fusion energy research, harm the American economy in the long term, and hinder innovative efforts to develop clean, safe energy production through fusion."   Read more on the Boston Globe website at: http://www.boston.com/news/science/blogs/science-in-mind/2013/05/21/senators-oppose-pending-shutdown-mit-fusion-experiment/bbH1leZAZD8QRKZzZkAgUI/blog.html

A new generation of 10 tesla uperconductors could make Tokamak style nuclear fusion reactors work. It could make them affordable, smaller, maintainable and remove the plasma problems. The development time could be greatly reduced from 50 years to 10 to 20 years. A new design would also switch to FLIBE molten salt for lower costs.   The overnight cost of a fission power plant is ~ $4/W ($2/W for China).
• First of kind fusion plants at least $10-20/W
• Which implies that developing fusion reactors at ~GWe scale requires 10-20 G$ "per try" e.g. ITER
• Chance of fusion development significantly improved if net thermal/electrical power produced at ~5-10 x smaller i.e. ~ 500 MW thermal
Read more here: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/05/10-tesla-superconductors-could-enable.html And also, for a more technical overview, here: http://fire.pppl.gov/FPA12_Whyte_SS.pdf

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has been recognized as the top facility in the state for environmental stewardship by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).   PPPL is first among more than 750 companies, colleges and universities, hospitals and municipalities enrolled in the DEP's Environmental Stewardship program, in which facilities voluntarily monitor themselves to improve their sustainability programs. The program rates facilities in categories including reducing greenhouse gas emissions, green building certification and green purchasing. PPPL has actively improved its performance in each of those areas.   "The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, long a leader in the area of fusion energy research, is also a leader in the area of being a good steward of the environment," DEP Commissioner Bob Martin said. "I commend their efforts at making sound environmental practices that benefit their staff, their community and their state an integral part of the facility's daily operations."   In a ceremony at PPPL on May 20, DEP Assistant Commissioner Wolfgang Skacel said the lab's achievement in meeting the standards is "unique."   Read more on PPPL web site at: http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S36/92/59G26/index.xml?section=topstories

Fusion energy, simply, is the exact opposite of fission energy, which comes from splitting an atom and is widely used to power nuclear plants and weapons. Fusion occurs constantly on our sun, which produces most of its energy via the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. When nuclei fuse, they create a heavier nucleus and produce a little leftover energy in the process.   Fusion doesn't produce runaway chain reactions the way fission can, so there's no need to worry about meltdowns. Nor do fusion reactions produce the large amounts of dangerous radioactive waste that fission reactions do. That's why it's such a dreamy source of energy.   Read more on Popular Mechanics'web site at: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/next-generation/why-dont-we-have-fusion-power-15480435?click=pm_latest

The makers of "Star Trek: Into Darkness" went boldly where few have gone before when they visited Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world's largest and most energetic laser system. With the approval of the Department of Energy, this unique facility was utilized for the first time as a film set.   The filming was conducted in 2012 during a normal maintenance cycle for the facility. All additive costs were completely reimbursed by the film company so as to have no impact on NIF's experimental plan.   Just as the "Star Trek" genre envisions a brighter future for humanity through exploration of the universe, the mission of NIF is to explore physical realms that were previously unobtainable in a laboratory setting. With greater than 50 times more energy of previous lasers, NIF enables the nation to address scientific grand challenges in national security, fusion energy and fundamental science. Built as a centerpiece of the National Nuclear Security Administration's Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP), NIF provides data required for maintaining the nuclear deterrent without the need for underground testing.   Scotty (Simon Pegg, in red shirt) and Captain Kirk (Chris Pine, far right) in a scene from Start Trek: Into The Darkness that was shot at the National Ignition Facility, California   Read more here: http://www.labmanager.com/?articles.view/articleNo/35665/title/National-Ignition-Facility-Provides-Backdrop-for-New-Star-Trek-Film/ 

"Can we extract energy from water?" was the question that attracted a rapt crowd to Slovenia's Jozef Stefan Institute, during their recent Open Day. Answering the question was Dr Luka Snoj, fusion physicist at the Institute, who included as part of his lecture live video conferences with ITER and JET.   During a ten minute cross to ITER, Rem Haange, Head of the ITER Project Department, gave an update on progress at the construction site. Unfortunately in the live cross to JET, Dr George Sips, from Operations in the JET Department, managed only a smile before the connection crashed.   Read more on EFDA's web site at: http://www.efda.org/2013/05/slovenian-crowds-invade-iter-and-jet/    

A long-running Massachusetts Institute of Technology research experiment that explores nuclear fusion as a possible energy source will shut down within a year, as its already diminished federal funding has been cut. Miklos Porkolab, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center where the project is housed, said that unless Congress decides to step in, 70 employees will be laid off, including physicists, technicians, engineers, and support staff. The shutdown will leave only two fusion experiments in the United States, one at Princeton University and the other at General Atomics, a company in San Diego. Half of the workers have already received notice, Porkolab said. Most of the 20 doctoral students working on the Alcator C-Mod project will be able to complete their thesis work based on data they've already taken, but about five may need to switch projects. The effect of the shutdown will reverberate beyond MIT, which produces the most PhD scientists in the field of fusion and plasma research in the United States.   Read more at: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/19/fusion-energy-research-mit-shut-down-people-lose-their-jobs/x8CDMwik26faDd9FmwlrTO/story.html

... Phil Heitzenroeder, who leads the Mechanical Engineering Division at the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

The Fusion Technology Award, granted by the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), recognizes outstanding contributions to research and development in the field of fusion technology.

Heitzenroeder has contributed to the design and construction of many of the world's major magnetic fusion facilities during a storied 40-year career at PPPL.

Read more here: http://princeton.patch.com/announcements/phil-heitzenroeder-named-winner-of-the-2013-fusion-technology-award

Tom Slattery, a 15-year-old from the UK, recently enjoyed a visit to the ITER site with his parents. Upon returning home, he addressed the following letter to ITER Communication (which he has given us permission to publish). We think you'll be impressed, like we were. Tom, we wish you all the best in your future career as a physicist!

After having visited the CERN laboratory, viewed the control labs and observed, from afar, the entrance to the tunnels, I felt that almost anything compared to that was bound to disappoint. ITER proved my assumption wrong. From the moment of arrival in the sunny car park, with its view to the distant snow-peaked Alps, I felt distinctly involved in the project at hand.

We drove up to the main site where we were given a once over of the structure of the future facility and also on the workings of nuclear fusion. My first thought was of the sheer size of the project. The area being cleared was enormous! There was machinery at work wherever you looked, earth being flattened, pipes laid, and, in the centre of it all, the construction of the main building itself.

We were driven round the expanse of the site, circling in on the future Tokamak Complex itself. At the moment, it is a huge, walled hole in the ground, punctuated by hundreds of concrete supports, each topped with a rubber plate and each taller than a person. Some of the struts are linear, but a large number of them are in a concentric pattern, marking the circumference of the fusion reactor. Next to the building works, on ground level, stands an industrial crane. When completed, the Tokamak Building will stand a few metres taller than this crane. I have visited the JET and MAST facilities in the Culham Centre for Fusion Research (CCFE), and I realise that ITER dwarfs both these reactors with ease.

The project itself feels like not just an advancement in science, but also common ground for countries involved all over the world, all with a common objective. It appears that now, in this age based on ever-depleting fuel sources, fusion presents the exciting prospect of a sustainable, almost unlimited energy source.

I also felt a sense of pride at the distance that science has come in recent years. As the investigation into particle physics zooms in on smaller and smaller scales, the machines required to perform the experiments become larger and more complicated. Undaunted by this, however, we have continued on and met those requirements, beginning yet another project to delve deeper into the micro world.

So how does this relate to me? The expected date (if all goes well) for First Plasma production is 2020, by which time I will be leaving university and will be ready to work. It is my ambition to work at this site as a physicist working on the experiment. That way I could feel part of something that will change the world that we live in.

Tom Slattery (age 15)