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The JT-60SA tokamak¡ªjust a few months from its first plasma as the updated "Super Advanced" satellite for ºÚÁÏÉçapp¡ªhas launched a new website.

The site features updated content and style, and aims to provide a wide audience, including students, the press, researchers and members of the general public, with information and regular status updates on JT-60SA.

Since the completion of assembly, the Japanese and European joint team is now preparing the device for first plasma, which is planned for spring 2021. Integrated commissioning is underway, including cooldown and progressive coil energization. 

Read all about it on the new .

Because the mechanical and thermal properties of materials can change substantially under neutron irradiation, one of the major challenges for the demonstration of fusion electricity is to develop neutron-resistant materials.

As part of the EUROfusion Roadmap to the Realisation of Fusion Energy (), the Belgian nuclear research lab SCK CEN tested ºÚÁÏÉçapp baseline structural materials like tungsten, copper and steel during a lengthy regimen of high heat and intense neutron radiation flux. Inside SCK CEN's fission research reactor BR2, the material samples spent two years facing a temperature of up to 1200 degrees Celsius in a hail of neutrons from uranium fission.

SCK CEN will now partner with other European research labs to investigate how the high speed neutrons have impacted the thermo-mechanical properties of the irradiated samples.

Read the full report on the EUROfusion .

--Image: A basic plasma-facing unit consisting of a tungsten block and a copper cooling water pipe. Source: SCK CEN

 

 

Harnessing fusion energy will provide humankind with a virtually unlimited, clean and safe energy source. It might also open the way to a new, superfast way of exploring the solar system and beyond.

Using the power of fusion to propel rockets to velocities otherwise unattainable, and hence dramatically shortening the duration of space travel, is not a new idea: at space agencies throughout the world, nuclear fusion propulsion has been on the agenda for decades.

The latest news in the field, however, does not come from a space agency but from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), one of the major plasma research institutions worldwide. A few years ago, Fatima Ebrahimi, a principal research physicist there, began thinking about "the similarities between a car's exhaust and the high-velocity exhaust particles created by PPPL's National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX)." During operation, she reflected, "NSTX produces magnetic bubbles called plasmoids that move at around 20 kilometres per second, which seemed to me a lot like thrust."

Ebrahimi nurtured and streamlined the concept for a few years and, in December 2020, introduced it in the Journal of Plasma Physics. The title ("An Alfvenic reconnecting plasmoid thruster"*) was rather austere but the content quite mind-boggling: according to simulations, Ebrahimi's plasma thruster could eject particles at velocities of up to 1,500 kilometres per second. All of sudden, Mars and the moon of Jupiter are appearing much closer.

Read a detailed article on the .

*Ebrahimi, F. (2020). An Alfvenic reconnecting plasmoid thruster. Journal of Plasma Physics, 86(6), 905860614. doi:10.1017/S0022377820001476

 

Due to Covid-19 pandemic and related global restrictions, the Local Organizing Committee of the 28th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (FEC2020) has decided, in collaboration with the IAEA, to hold the conference on a virtual platform with the same dates maintained, from 10- 15 May 2021.

In addition to a full program, which will be available globally in appropriate time zones for each audience, we will also ensure opportunities for sponsoring and networking. If you are a potential sponsor and interested in finding out more about these opportunities, you can contact us at @email. 

Consult the FEC 2020 scientific program .

Registration opens on 1 March 2021; more information at .

 

The detailed program for the ºÚÁÏÉçapp's Remote ºÚÁÏÉçapp Business Meeting is now available at the following address.

Over the two-day remote meeting on 7 - 8 April 2021, experts from the ºÚÁÏÉçapp will be presenting information about upcoming contracts and procurement needs including the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Hot Cell Complex, the Tritium Plant, and maintenance services, among others. Experts will be also available for one-to-one meetings with industry representatives.

The conference is free of charge but advance registration is required. You can register now through 6 April 2021 at this address.

On 22 December 2020, the Fusion Energy Forum of Japan (FEFJ) held its annual Symposium on the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project and Broader Approach* activities. Featuring speakers from government, business, academia, and science, the 3.5-hour event covered fusion energy policy in Japan, progress in domestic and international fusion projects (including ºÚÁÏÉçapp and the Broader Approach), frontiers of research, and industrial applications.

See all speakers and presentations at . 

Watch the event on YouTube or with a .  

* The Broader Approach activities, financed by Europe and Japan, aim to accelerate the realization of fusion energy. Find out more .

The European Domestic Agency for ºÚÁÏÉçapp, Fusion for Energy, has opened a contest to reward companies for the commercial use of fusion technologies in non-fusion markets. 

Open to all European companies and organizations, the Technology Transfer Award competition aims to encourage and promote projects where a fusion technology or know-how is used or is planned to be used outside of fusion applications.

Applications will be evaluated according to the resources and efforts deployed by the candidate to achieve commercial use of the technology in a non-fusion market, as well as the socio-economic impact of the project on the market. The selected project will receive a sole prize of €10,000.

Applications are open from 18 January 2021 to 18 March 2021 at .

As part of its countdown to first plasma, the JT-60SA tokamak has entered the coil energization phase. Superconducting coil EF2 has been supplied with up to 1 kA of power. 

This major commissioning milestone comes after the recent completion of the cooldown of the magnet system to 4.5 K and the completion of power supply testing. In the next days the current supplied to EF2 will be gradually increased as the quench detection circuits and the power supply controllers are tuned.

JT-60SA is a collaborative project, financed and executed jointly by Europe and Japan under the Broader Approach agreement. Following a six-year upgrade program, the teams expect to begin experiments imminently.

Read more about the project .

ºÚÁÏÉçapp Russia (ROSATOM) has teamed with documentary film makers to create a 38-minute feature on fusion and ºÚÁÏÉçapp called "On the Way to the Sun" (§¯§Ñ §á§å§ä§Ú §Ü §³§à§Ý§ß§è§å). 

In 2021, the film makers will present it at leading international and domestic festivals.

You can view it free of charge on YouTube (in Russian) at .

From 19 to 25 November 2020, an independent expert panel reviewed EUROfusion's R&D and design work on DEMO, Europe's future demonstration fusion power plant. Following this in-depth review, the next step of the European Roadmap to Fusion Energy, the conceptual design phase, can begin.

EUROfusion is taking a staged approach to designing DEMO, with industry-standard review practices including a gate review process. Each project phase is reviewed by a panel of independent experts before the project can advance to the next phase. This allows the DEMO team to learn from the experience of ºÚÁÏÉçapp and guarantees that DEMO has the support and involvement of the European fusion community and the companies that will design and construct it.

Read more about the DEMO gate review on the EUROfusion .

 

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the European Fusion Education Network (FuseNet) are calling on fusion enthusiasts around the world to review scientific literature and online resources to find as many zero-dimensional, or independent, design parameters as possible for active fusion tokamak and stellarator experimental reactors in the IAEA's interactive Fusion Device Information System () database. The data collected through the challenge, which is aimed at students and young professionals with an understanding of fusion without being experts, will prove useful for simulations, modelling and design studies to advance fusion research.

The challenge is looking for submissions that include the following parameters: radii, plasma current, magnetic field strength, material composition of device wall and divertor, plasma shape, elongation and triangularity.

Participants have until 31 January 2021 to submit their answers .

Click to see the and announcements.

A new fusion documentary follows the efforts underway at ºÚÁÏÉçapp, JET, and First Light Fusion to realize "the ultimate energy solution."

Produced by Bigger Bang Communications (UK) and narrated by actor Patrick Stewart (known for his distinct voice), the 60-minute film is part of a six-part series called Engineering the Future. "A global industrial revolution is underway, driven by passionate, dedicated individuals intent on shaping a new world. A cleaner world. A greener world. Together, they are pushing engineering to its limits to create extraordinary machines that can protect our planet for the future."

The episode on fusion can be viewed on  and (paywalls).

In a paper published this month in Nature Energy, a team from the Universidad Nacional de Educaci¨®n a Distancia (UNED, Spain) offers the scientific community a "full and heterogeneous model of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Tokamak" for comprehensive nuclear analyses.

"Nuclear analysis is a core discipline in support of the design, commissioning and operation of the machine. To date, it has been conducted with increasingly detailed partial models, which represented toroidal segments of the tokamak. However, the limitations of this methodology became evident as estimates of quantities relevant to design, safety and operation showed unquantifiable uncertainties, which is a risk. [...] Thanks to increasing high-performance computing capabilities and improvements in the memory management by the codes over the years, it is now feasible to take an important step forward. In this work, we present a 360¡ã heterogeneous and detailed MCNP model of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp tokamak, which we call E-lite. It can be used to determine all the quantities relevant to the ºÚÁÏÉçapp's nuclear operations without the aforementioned uncertainties."

The main authors¡ªRafael Juarez, an associate professor at UNED, and Gabriel Pedroche, a PhD student in the same research team¡ªworked closely with colleagues from ºÚÁÏÉçapp and the European Domestic Agency (Fusion for Energy). Key contributions came from Michael Loughlin, Eduard Polunovskiy and Yannick Le Tonqueze from the ºÚÁÏÉçapp, and Raul Pampin and Marco Fabbri from Fusion for Energy.

Follow the link below to consult the article:

Juarez, R., Pedroche, G., Loughlin, M.J. et al. A full and heterogeneous model of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp tokamak for comprehensive nuclear analyses. Nat Energy (2021).  

 See a by Fusion for Energy.

Javier Santaolalla is a Spanish engineer and doctor in particle physics who has worked at CIEMAT, CERN and the French National Centre for Space Studies. On YouTube you can look him up as a scientific popularizer with a number of well-followed channels that tackle physics, explaining concepts like black holes, the Higgs boson and the second law of thermodynamics in an entertaining and informative way.   In December, he released a 16-minute feature on ºÚÁÏÉçapp (ºÚÁÏÉçapp: As¨ª ser¨¢ el mayor reactor nuclear del planeta) that has reached 375,000 views.   You can watch it (in Spanish) .

The Japanese ICT company NTT has made a short video in promotion of fusion and ºÚÁÏÉçapp with the famous Japanese baseball player Ichir¨­ Suzuki, an American League All Star who played for the New York Yankees as well as the Seattle Mariners and the Miami Marlins in the course of his nearly 30-year career. In the short film Ichir¨­ is introduced to fusion and ºÚÁÏÉçapp as promising paths forward to energy sustainability.   You can see the promotional film on YouTube .

On Wednesday 13 January 2021, the Stellar Energy Foundation and Pegasus Fusion Strategies are co-hosting a webinar-style workshop titled "Energy, Environment, Innovation: Fusion's Promise for our Climate."

Join featured speakers Laban Coblentz, Head of Communication at ºÚÁÏÉçapp, and Dennis Whyte, Director of the MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center and Hitachi American Professor of Engineering at MIT, for a thought-provoking discussion of the state of energy supply and demand today, the effort to mitigate atmospheric CO2, and the possible role of fusion energy.

Is fusion power a realistic green energy option for combating climate change? Should private sector fusion projects be given priority over large multinational projects such as ºÚÁÏÉçapp? Can we rely on renewables like wind and solar to avoid climate change?

The 90-minute webinar (11:30 a.m. ¡ª 1:00 p.m. US Eastern time) will be moderated by Chris Gadomski from BloombergNEF.

Update 18 January 2021: The recording of the webinar can be found at .

This month, the ºÚÁÏÉçapp community respected time-honoured Provencal traditions by installing a cr¨¨che and a Christmas tree in the lobby of ºÚÁÏÉçapp Headquarters. The new mayor of Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, Andr¨¦ Gomez, and deputy-mayor in charge of communication, Elise Plac¨¦, were by Director-General Bernard Bigot's side for the tree lighting on 1 December. (The tree was offered by the village of Saint-Paul.)

China has announced that the HL-2M tokamak produced its first plasma discharge on 4 December 2020.   HL-2M is a medium-sized copper-conductor tokamak located at the Southwestern Institute of Physics (SWIP) in Chengdu, China. It is a totally new machine, with some systems upgraded from the HL-2A tokamak that had been in operation since 2002. HL-2M is designed to have 3MA plasma current, and over 100 million degree Celsius ion temperature.   With a flexible divertor, a new set of toroidal field coils, and a shaped plasma with improved stability. HL-2M will contribute to establishing the scientific and technical basis for optimizing the tokamak approach to fusion energy and prepare important scaling information for ºÚÁÏÉçapp operation.   --Photo: China Atomic Energy Authority

The Thailand Institute of Nuclear Technology has started the construction of the building that will house the country's first tokamak and ancillary systems.

The Thai Tokamak-1, or TT-1, will be developed from HT-6M¡ªa device developed at the Chinese Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) in the 1980s and donated to Thailand in 2018. It will be used to train a new generation of students in magnetic confinement fusion.

Thailand made its first steps into fusion research in 2015 when a series of conferences was organized in Bangkok by specialists from the French Institute for Magnetic Fusion Research (IRFM). In December 2018, HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, visited ºÚÁÏÉçapp with TINT specialists, and a Cooperation Agreement was signed to promote cooperation and educational exchange between the two institutions.

Construction of the TINT Tokamak Workshop Building will be completed in 2022.

See  from the Bangkok Post. 

The 2021 ºÚÁÏÉçapp Business Forum (IBF/21), originally planned in Marseille, France, from 6 to 8 April 2021, has been postponed to April 2022 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
 
The ºÚÁÏÉçapp will be organizing a smaller-scale remote event called the "Remote ºÚÁÏÉçapp Business Meeting" in April 2021.

During the two-day remote meeting on 7 and 8 April 2021, experts from the ºÚÁÏÉçapp will be presenting specific information about contracts and procurement needs for the next years. They will be also available for one-to-one meetings with industry representatives.

The conference is free of charge but advance registration is required.