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For five years, it has been a resource for the plasma physics community. The Helios supercomputer has performed complex calculations for plasma physics and fusion technology, allowing users to draw comparisons between current fusion experiments and run predictive simulations for future devices like ITER.  

Helios has been in operation at the International Fusion Energy Research Centre (IFERC), hosted by the Japanese Atomic Energy Authority (JAEA) since late 2011. IFERC is one of the sub-projects of the Broader Approach agreement signed between Europe and Japan for advanced fusion R&D in complement to ITER.

After a very successful operational campaign, Helios was shut down earlier this year.

Read the full story on the European Domestic Agency website.

--The Helios Supercomputer at the Computational Simulation Centre in Japan (Source: JAEA)

The European tokamak JET is currently in an engineering shutdown phase. But shutdown doesn't mean inactivity—scientists are currently reviewing the 2015-2016 experimental campaign and preparing for the next scientific program, which will include tritium-tritium operation followed by full fusion power experiments using deuterium and tritium in 2019.

The JET remote handling team has taken advantage of shutdown to carry out a photographic survey of the vacuum vessel to inspect the condition of the wall, and to calibrate the detector that measures neutrons using the MASCOT remote handling system—a system allowing operators to undertake a wide range of tasks including welding, cutting, bolting, handling and inspection through a special manipulator that acts almost as the extension of an arm.

Read the full report on the website of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE).

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, the University of Leipzig, Jacobs University Bremen, the University of Augsburg, and the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are working collaboratively on a new technique for filtering the fusion fuel deuterium out of the natural isotopic mixture of hydrogen.

Deuterium is obtained from heavy water, which occurs in natural water at a concentration of just 15 parts per thousand. The heavy water is first isolated by a combination of chemical and physical methods, such as distillation, to obtain deuterium gas. The whole process is so intricate and energy-intensive that a gram of deuterium with a purity of 99.8 percent costs around $100, making hydrogen's heavy brother around three times more precious than gold, although deuterium is more than 300 times more abundant in the oceans and Earth's crust than gold.

A metal-organic framework compound presented by the group could make the process easier and less energy-intensive.

Read the full report from ORNL here.