ºÚÁÏÉçapp

Following a four-year upgrade to double the magnetic field strength, plasma current and heating power capability of the NSTX spherical tokamak, located at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in the US, researchers reported on the first ten-week operational campaign at the recent IAEA Fusion Energy Conference in Kyoto, Japan.

Important results included increased pulse duration and maximum magnetic field strength; achievement of the optimum H-mode regime; success in reducing plasma instabilities through a second neutral beam injector; and commissioning all magnetic diagnostics.

Read the full report at .

Professor Paul Vandenplas, emeritus professor of the Royal Military Academy in Brussels, Belgium and longtime proponent of nuclear fusion, has passed away at age 84.

In the course of his illustrious career he was director of the association "EURATOM-Belgian State" for controlled nuclear fusion; acted in the role of president of the EURATOM Fusion programme committee and vice-president of its advisory committee; served on the governing board of the JET tokamak; and played a role in the site negotiations for the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project. He was also the director/founder of the Laboaratory for Plasma Physics ERM/KMS

In 2014 he was honoured for his contributions to fusion research with the Minerva Prize (F?rderverein Museum J¨¹lich e.V.). Professor Vandenplas was also Grand officer of the Order of the Crown, Officer and Grand Officer of the Order of Leopold II, and Knight.

One month ago, on 30 September, the ºÚÁÏÉçapp signed a technical Cooperation Agreement with Australia, as represented by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO). ANSTO CEO Adi Paterson had the opportunity to report on the Agreement to the Australian Parliament on 20 October. See the official recording (Senate Economics Legislation Committee, 15:07:00).

At the Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research (DIFFER) research focuses on two major energy themes: fusion energy, and the conversion and storage of sustainable energy in solar fuels. In this first issue of the DIFFER newsletter , launched in October, read all about the different experiments underway.

The European Domestic Agency has published a short flyover of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp worksite that was filmed in early October.

Click to see the latest progress on the Tokamak Complex and the work that is advancing on the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Cryoplant Building, the cooling tower area, and the Magnet Power Conversion Building area.

The 26th IAEA  kicked off today in Kyoto, Japan.

The biennial rendezvous for fusion researchers from over 40 countries, the conference aims to highlight worldwide advances in fusion theory, experimental results, technology, engineering, safety and socio-economics.

ºÚÁÏÉçapp Director-General Bernard Bigot spoke on the first day, presenting the progress in ºÚÁÏÉçapp construction, manufacturing and R&D to an audience of scientists, engineers, policy makers, and representatives of industry.

Over 1,000 visitors are expected during the six-day event, hosted this year by the Government of Japan and organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency in cooperation with the Japanese National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS).

At the ºÚÁÏÉçapp stand, visitors will have the occasion to experience a virtual reality tour of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp construction site (Oculus Rift) and admire a Lego tokamak designed and built by students from Kyoto University.

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano (here with ºÚÁÏÉçapp's Julie Marcillat) was one of the first visitors to the ºÚÁÏÉçapp stand on Monday 17 October.

The Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) facility at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) in the UK is undergoing a major upgrade that, once completed, will allow it to add to the knowledge base for ºÚÁÏÉçapp and experiment with candidate technological solutions for future fusion power reactors.

The upgrade will permit longer pulse lengths, improved neutral beam heating, and new features to improve plasma profile control and the study of plasma instabilities.

Recently, progress on the largest sub-system¡ªneutral beam heating¡ªwas made as the internal components were installed into two neutral beam injector vacuum vessels. The team is now on schedule to have both beamlines finished by the end of the year.

More information here:

At a specialized laboratory in Germany, electrical tests have been successfully performed on a 1/15th scale mockup of the high voltage deck planned for MITICA, the ºÚÁÏÉçapp-sized neutral beam injector that will be tested in advance of installation on ºÚÁÏÉçapp at the PRIMA neutral beam test facility in Italy.

Positioned on four large gas-insulated columns at six metres above the floor, the 4 x 4 x 4 metre mockup was subjected to high voltage testing in order to validate the design choices of the European Domestic Agency supplier SIEMENS AG.

In a 24-hour period, the mockup passed one long-duration test (5 hours at 1.2 million volts DC) and several short-duration tests (impulses of 50 micro-seconds at 2.1 million volts). The tests were designed to verify that the deck will sustain the different voltage levels that are expected during MITICA operation.

Read more about the high voltage tests on the European Domestic Agency . For more on PRIMA, click here.

A new acronym is making its way into the fusion landscape: DONES, for DEMO Oriented Neutron Source.

In Europe, a roadmap* for the realization of fusion energy was published in 2012 that breaks down the quest to supply fusion electricity to the grid into eight missions. One of these is to investigate and select neutron-resistant materials for DEMO, the demonstration fusion reactor that¡ªaccording to the European strategy¡ªis the step between ºÚÁÏÉçapp and a commercial fusion power plant.

More powerful than ºÚÁÏÉçapp and connected to the grid, DEMO will require materials capable of withstanding a stronger flux of neutrons for longer periods.

Currently three R&D projects carried out with the framework of a scientific collaboration between Europe and Japan (the ) are contributing to the design of DEMO. The engineering design and validation activities for the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF/EVEDA) are evolving successfully. But when its operation will come to an end, DONES, a future version of IFMIF, will take over and help the scientific community to perform tests and start collecting data.

Designed to mimic the conditions of neutron irradiation in DEMO, DONES would allow scientists to test materials and characterize candidate fusion materials.

Three European countries¡ªCroatia, Poland and Spain¡ªhave expressed interest in hosting the facility. In September, the European Domestic Agency for ºÚÁÏÉçapp, which acts as a coordinator for the European activities of the Broader Approach, invited representatives from all three to a technical information session in Barcelona to explain the scope of DONES, outline preliminary technical specifications, and discuss the different steps leading to the submission of applications.

Read the full article on the European Domestic Agency .

*The was published by EFDA (the European Fusion Development Agreement, superseded in 2014 by EUROfusion).

In the Poloidal Field Coil Winding Facility, on site at ºÚÁÏÉçapp, fabrication of a qualification mockup of poloidal field coil #5 (17 metres in diameter) began in September.

Click to view a timelapse video produced by the European Domestic Agency for ºÚÁÏÉçapp. More information on the manufacturing process .

At the , on the Neva River near Saint Petersburg (Russia), manufacturing work is underway on ºÚÁÏÉçapp's poloidal field coil, #1 (PF1).

Click to view the different stages of fabrication of this 200-tonne component, the smallest of ºÚÁÏÉçapp's six ring-shaped magnets. (ºÚÁÏÉçapp Russia)

The Japanese Domestic Agency has delivered a large number of books and teaching materials to the Japanese section of the Provence-Alpes-C?te d'Azur International School (), which caters to the families of ºÚÁÏÉçapp staff as well as to the regional population.

This is the third book donation made by ºÚÁÏÉçapp Japan to the Japanese language section and its pupils since the school opened in 2007. The school currently hosts six language sections (Chinese, English, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish), where teaching is divided between the host language (French) and the language of the section.

The books were presented in a ceremony on 30 September by the head of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Japan Liaison Office, Katsumi Nakajima, to school director Bernard Fronsacq.

For the third year in a row, the Swiss Plasma Center is offering a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on plasma physics.

The popular class is divided into two parts--the basics of plasma physics, followed by applications of plasma physics (including fusion). Students can follow the segment sequentially, at their own pace, or begin with the more advanced course.

The class, which begins on 13 October, is given in English by plasma physicists from the Swiss Plasma Center.

More information .

Prof. Stewart Prager, a world-renowned plasma physicist and passionate voice for a future of clean, abundant and benign energy fueled by fusion, has stepped down from the directorship of the national laboratory he has headed for the last eight years. [...]

Prager, the sixth director in the 65-year history of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), joined the lab in the fall of 2008 after a long career at the University of Wisconsin. A pioneer in plasma physics, he is internationally known for experiments that contribute to the fundamental knowledge of fusion energy and the design of devices that will produce it.

Read the full article on the PPPL .

The last shipment of cryostat base segments (three segments/120 tonnes each) left Hazira, India on 2 September. Prior to being shipped, on 16 August, a flag-off ceremony was held at the Larsen & Toubro Ltd plant, where the cryostat segments are being manufactured. With this shipment, due to reach France after a month-long sea journey, India has completed shipment of all major pieces of the cryostat base (tier-1 and tier-2). Welding operations for Tier 1 of the cryostat base have already begun on the ºÚÁÏÉçapp site.

Marconi-Fusion, the new high performance computer for fusion applications, was inaugurated on 14 September 2016 at the CINECA headquarters in Bologna.

Supercomputing is an important aspect of nuclear fusion research as it plays a crucial role in the modelling of the plasma and materials, validating the experimental results of fusion devices and designing the next-generation fusion machine DEMO. Marconi Fusion should be capable of a total computational power of around 6 petaflop per second, thanks to the modern generation of Intel Xeon processors. A petaflop means 1015 operations per second... a total of a one quadrillion head-spinning calculations simutaneously. 

The goal of this system will be to provide a common high performance computing platform for European fusion researchers.

In 2015 EUROfusion's highest decision-making body, the General Assembly, selected the Italian research unit  along with , the largest Italian computing centre, to develop and run the new system.

The supercomputer was named after Guglielmo Giovanni Marconi, the inventor of wireless communication, who was born in Bologna in 1874. 

Source:

From 28 April to 4 May 2017, the Ettore Majorana Foundation in Erice, Sicily, will host the 16th edition of the International School of Fusion Reactor Technology (ISFRT16).

The course will cover areas of interest to the magnetic fusion confinement (tokamak, stellarators), inertial confinement, and plasma physics scientific communities, with particular focus on developments in diagnostics and technology in view of ºÚÁÏÉçapp and the machine that comes after ºÚÁÏÉçapp, DEMO.

ISFRT16 is open in particular to students and researchers wishing to enter this new field. Lectures will cover current developments in theory and experiments but are also intended to give the basics of the field. Poster sessions are planned to allow participants to show their work.

Registration ends on 28 February 2017. More information on the conference .

At the Srednenevsky Shipbuilding Plant in Russia, technicians have completed the winding operations for the first poloidal field double pancake¡ªone of eight double pancakes that will be stacked to form ºÚÁÏÉçapp's smallest ring magnet, poloidal field coil 1 (PF1).

During the next stage in the manufacturing process, the completed pancake will be impregnated with epoxy resin. The resin hardens the glass tape that is wrapped around the conductor to bind the double pancake into a rigid assembly. Following the successful manufacturing readiness review for the technique, called vacuum-pressure impregnation, impregnation activities on the first PF1 pancake will begin in October.

ºÚÁÏÉçapp's poloidal field coils are fabricated from niobium-titanium superconductor, which becomes superconducting at super-low temperatures.

Of ºÚÁÏÉçapp's six poloidal field coils, PF1 is the first to proceed to the impregnation stage of the fabrication process, which involves winding and impregnating each double pancake before forming the final assembly.

More on the poloidal field magnets here.

Image: The winding table at the Srednenevsky Shipbuilding Plant.

Temperatures of over hundred million degrees centigrade and high energy neutrons and alpha particles that blast everything to shreds. What materials can withstand the harsh conditions in fusion reactors? TU Delft researcher In¨ºs Carvalho set out to discover.

Follow this  to the article.

Source: Technische Universiteit Delft.

On Saturday 10 September, close to 450 participants met near ºÚÁÏÉçapp, in Vinon-sur-Verdon, for a number of sporting events designed to create and reinforce ties between people working on the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project and neighbours from the surrounding villages. The 2016 edition of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Games offered a broad choice of sporting disciplines for all levels, including football, cross-country running, mountain biking, kayaking, tennis and petanque. The competitions were followed by a bucolic lunch and an afternoon of family activities.