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You're currently reading the news digest published from 22 June 2015 to 29 June 2015.
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28 June 2005: a home at last

Ten years ago, on 28 June 2005, a home was found for ITER. In Moscow, where ministerial-level representatives of the ITER Members had convened, a consensus had at last been reached:  the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor planned by China, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States (India would join six months later) would be located in Cadarache, a locality in the village of Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, some 75 kilometres north of Marseille, France. Cadarache was a familiar name for the fusion community worldwide. Home to one of the French Atomic Energy Commission's (CEA) largest research centres, it hosts its magnetic fusion department and the Tore Supra superconducting tokamak. In the last round of a two-year negotiation, the Cadarache site—proposed by the European Union—was unanimously chosen for the world's largest fusion facility. A little less than twenty years after the design activities for the project had been launched, the Moscow decision marked the end of a long, difficult and sometimes painful process. It all began in the spring of 2001 when the ITER Final Design Report — the detailed blueprint of the installation — was being finalized for submission to the ITER Council. A group of Canadian industrialists and academics who were interested in being part of the project (Canada, as a nation, was not a Member) made a first proposal in April 2001 for a site in Clarington, Ontario, home to the Darlington nuclear power plant, some 20 kilometres east of Toronto. "For the first time since the project's inception in 1985, the name 'ITER' was associated with a precise location," remembers Jean Jacquinot, one of the experts who participated in the negotiations. "The Canadian proposal lent credibility to the project." Experts in Cadarache had undertaken "site studies" as early as the mid-1990s. In 2000, these studies were reactivated and updated and, in 2003, a formal proposal was made by the European Union to the other Parties. The year before, year, Spain had proposed a site at Vandellòs, on the Mediterranean shore south of Tarragona (also the location of a nuclear power plant), and Japan proposed Rokkasho-Mura, where a uranium enrichment plant, nuclear waste storage installation and used fuel reprocessing plant cohabit on a peninsula 14 kilometres long. One site in Canada, two in Europe, one in Japan — that was three too many... In Europe, the issue was solved on 26 November 2003 when the twenty-five Research ministers of the member states voted unanimously for Cadarache. As compensation, Spain would host the soon-to-be-established European Domestic Agency, responsible for the European in-kind contributions to the project. As for the Canadian consortium, it decided to withdraw from the ITER negotiations the following month. The year 2003 was drawing to an end and the ITER Members still had a decision to make. On 30 June, two days after the decision, French President Jacques Chirac was in Cadarache to celebrate the momentous event. From left to right, first row: Alain Bugat, Administrator-General of the French Atomic Energy Authoriy (CEA); Michel Chatelier head of the Fusion Research Department at CEA-Cadarache (DRFC); President Chirac; Pascale Amenc-Antoni, director of CEA-Cadarache. Second row: Christian Frémont, regional préfet; Jean-Louis Bianco, president of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence département; Bernard Bigot, High Commissionner for Atomic Energy and Jean-Claude Gaudin, Mayor of Marseille and vice-president of the French Senate. Four days before Christmas, their ministerial representatives met in Reston, Virginia, a suburb of the US federal capital. The meeting was heralded as decisive; expectant TV crews camped outside the gates of the site in France, media representatives were in constant contact by telephone with the different delegations ... but the Reston negotiations ended in gridlock. An optimistic joint communique, however, proclaimed: "The six Parties have reached a strong consensus on a number of points. We have two excellent sites for ITER, so excellent in fact that we need further evaluation before making our decisions based on consensus." Reaching consensus would require another 18 months. In order to break the gridlock, a "Broader Approach" program was devised that included the construction of a materials research installation for fusion, "a satellite machine" for ITER, a computing centre for fusion science and a centre for remote experimentation — something for which Europe had always advocated. The Broader Approach installations would offer scientific and economic "compensation" for the party that would not host the machine. Additional meetings were organized in Vienna in February 2004 and again in June, politicians on both sides entered the game, and partisan newspaper columns were published ... some fair, some less so. On both sides, the spring of 2005 was rife with sibylline declarations, allusions, hints... On 28 June the long-awaited decision was at last made official in a joint public announcement by Janez Potočnik, the European Commissioner for Science, and Noriaki Nakayama, the Japanese Minister of Science and Technology. "I wish to say that today Japan is both sad and happy," said Nakayama. "However, this project is so important that we have decided to overcome our grief and change it into joy." Two days later, French President Jacques Chirac was in Cadarache to celebrate the momentous event. No one had "won," no one had "lost." The ITER Members had demonstrated their capacity to overcome difficult odds and to imagine a solution that was acceptable to all And so ten years ago, the ITER Members laid the foundation for the kind of spirit that continues to carry forward this unique collaboration for science.
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ITER — a piece of art

His black and white images of the stellarator Wendelstein 7-X have more resemblance to an alien spaceship than a fusion device. And, through his lens, the rather prosaic Poloidal Field Coils Winding Facility at ITER takes on another dimension. German photographer Christian Luenig is well respected in the fields of documentary photography, photojournalism and photo arts. He has won many awards for his interpretation of architecture, technology and research — and even the occasional rave party. One of his most recent prizes was received for work on two German fusion devices, the Textor tokamak in Juelich and the Wendelstein stellarator in Greifswald. "I have always been fascinated by capturing complex scientific projects, by translating high-tech into art. When I read about Wendelstein being assembled at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasmaphysics I thought—I have to get in there! And so it was..."   It comes thus as no surprise that — having made contact with the fusion community - he wished to shoot the "the making of" at ITER.    The characteristic texture and particular lighting of Luenig's images comes from a technique called "tone mapping." Multiple exposures of one object are digitally layered and then rendered by a special program. The result is quite dramatic on metal surfaces such as fusion devices.   The image gallery below shows some of the results from his maiden visit to the ITER worksite. He will certainly be back once the assembly of the ITER machine is in full swing to create art from the ITER machine.   For more information about Christian Luenig and to view his work, visit www.arbeitsblende.de. (All images: Christian Lünig/ VG Bild und Kunst)    
Of interest

X marks the spot

https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=489
​Rotation is key to the performance of salad spinners, toy tops, and centrifuges, but recent research suggests a way to harness rotation for the future of mankind's energy supply. In papers published in Physics of Plasmas in May and Physical Review Letters this month, Timothy Stoltzfus-Dueck, a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), demonstrated a novel method that scientists can use to manipulate the intrinsic — or self-generated — rotation of hot, charged plasma gas within fusion facilities called tokamaks.  Such a method could prove important for future facilities like ITER, the huge international tokamak under construction in France that will demonstrate the feasibility of fusion as a source of energy for generating electricity. ITER's massive size will make it difficult for the facility to provide sufficient rotation through external means. Rotation is essential to the performance of all tokamaks. Rotation can stabilize instabilities in plasma, and sheared rotation — the difference in velocities between two bands of rotating plasma — can suppress plasma turbulence, making it possible to maintain the gas's high temperature with less power and reduced operating costs. Today's tokamaks produce rotation mainly by heating the plasma with neutral beams, which cause it to spin. In intrinsic rotation, however, rotating particles that leak from the edge of the plasma accelerate the plasma in the opposite direction, just as the expulsion of propellant drives a rocket forward. On the Tokamak à Configuration Variable (TCV) in Lausanne, Switzerland, Stoltzfus-Dueck and the TCV team influenced intrinsic rotation by moving the so-called X-point — the dividing point between magnetically confined plasma and plasma that has leaked from confinement.  Read the full article on the PPPL website. (Images obtained on the TCV tokamak.)

JET's next tritium experiments materialize

https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=488
​Since 2011, JET has been using beryllium and tungsten as plasma-facing materials in the vessel. As the name suggests JET's ITER-like wall is constructed using the same materials that will be used in ITER, the next generation fusion experiment which is currently being built in France. So far, experiments with the new wall have been fuelled by hydrogen and deuterium. Since the most economic fuel for future fusion power plants is a mix of deuterium and tritium, this mixture needs to be put to the test. As part of the preparations for this extraordinary event, the first delivery of tritium has arrived at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), the home of JET. Tim Jones, project sponsor from CCFE explains: 'For licensing reasons, only a limited amount of tritium may be transferred over the JET tritium storage facility in an individual batch quantity. Additional batches will later be delivered in order to collect together a total amount of 55 grams that will be needed for the scheduled campaign." Dedicated sets of experiments using deuterium and tritium are necessary to promote understanding of the influence of the fuel isotope on plasma performance and on interactions between the plasma and the new wall. Similar experiments to those planned with tritium are being prepared with hydrogen and deuterium, so far the results show that ITER operating regimes are compatible with the new wall materials.   Read the full article on the EUROfusion website.

June issue of F4E News

https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=487
​A round-up of the latest news articles, videos and images from the European Domestic Agency for ITER can be found in the June edition of the F4E News, accessible by clicking on this link.

Hot forming the vacuum vessel

https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=486
​The European consortium responsible for manufacturing seven of the nine ITER vacuum vessel sectors has begun hot forming activities on sector #5. In this video filmed by Patrick Vertongen (ITER Quality Assurance & Assessment Division) at Walter Tosto SpA in Chieti, Italy (part of the AMW consortium, with Ansaldo Nucleare S.p.A and Mangiarotti S.p.A) a stainless steel plate is pressed into the required shape through an open die hot forming process.   First, the 60 millimetre-thick plates are heated to 930 °C in a gas-fired furnace and maintained at this temperature for 30 minutes. Then, the plate is removed from the furnace and positioned in a die to be pressed. After two hours in the die, the plate is removed and cooled for the next manufacturing operation.   Each of the nine vacuum vessel sectors will be 13 metres high, 6.5 metres wide, 6.3 metres deep and will weigh approximately 500 tons; all of the sectors are double-walled, containing thermal shielding in the interstice to protect the super conducting coils. The other two sections of the ITER vacuum vessel are being supplied by Korea.   Click here to watch the video (With the authorization of Walter Tosto SpA.)

Fusion energy sooner and cheaper?

https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=485
​What would it mean to have an essentially limitless amount of energy? If we can harness fusion power, we can have energy that is clean, safe, sustainable, and secure. It will be the power of a sun on earth. The dream of fusion energy has been a scientific goal for decades, but it has remained elusive. On Tuesday, June 16, 2015, Dennis Whyte, the Director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center showed that a series of scientific and engineering breakthroughs could enable fusion to become a feasible a power source faster and cheaper than anyone had thought possible. These technological breakthroughs—High Temperature Superconducting magnets, 3D printing techniques, and a new liquid salt material that could be used as a liquid blanket—were not originally developed for fusion, but they could revolutionize the development of fusion energy.   As a part of New York Energy Week, Whyte presented the recent and ongoing technological breakthroughs to a group of professionals from energy, finance, and media at FTI Strategic Communications' Wall Street office. This event was sponsored by the American Security Project as part of their program on Next Generation Energy.   See the original article and slide show presentation here.
Press

X marks the spot: Researchers confirm novel method for controlling plasma rotation to improve fusion performance

http://www.pppl.gov/news/2015/06/x-marks-spot-researchers-confirm-novel-method-controlling-plasma-rotation-improve

ITER: on the path to change

http://www.neimagazine.com/features/featureiter-on-the-path-to-change-4605964/