ºÚÁÏÉçapp

During its fifth General Assembly held at ºÚÁÏÉçapp on 4 February, the European Fusion Education Network FuseNet approved a work plan for the period 2016-2017.

The FuseNet Association was founded in December 2010 as a platform for stimulating, supporting and coordinating fusion education in Europe, with the aim to the aim of attracting good students and providing them challenging education in fusion science and technology, developing educational tools, encouraging student mobility, and acting as matchmaker between industry and research labs/academia for student internships and vacancies.

FuseNet members are made up of universities with programs in fusion as well as research institutes and industry involved in ºÚÁÏÉçapp and/or fusion technology. Membership is not restricted to European organizations.

For more information, visit the FuseNet .

In the latest issue of NFRI News Korea's National Fusion Research Institute reports the latest KSTAR experimental campaign. Ten overseas research institutes and nine Korean institutes collaborated on this eighth campaign, which ended in December 2015. 

The January issue also announces the 2015 NFRI Award was attributed to Hyeongon Lee, the Deputy Director General of ºÚÁÏÉçapp Korea. The award recognizes Prof. Lee's leading work on non-destructive testing technology for ºÚÁÏÉçapp and the validation of analysis relating to the ºÚÁÏÉçapp thermal shield and assembly tooling.

Read the January issue of NFRI News .

The vacuum vessel is getting a paint job ¡ª and its new look will ensure the experiment produces top-quality plasma physics data when it starts operating next year.

While it's a shame to cover up the gleaming stainless steel surfaces, science must take precedence over aesthetic considerations. A number of key measuring systems ¡ª diagnostics ¡ª on MAST-U will rely on accurate readings of light from the plasma. With uncovered steel, the light bounces off the vessel surfaces, playing havoc with the measurements. Reflected light also makes it more difficult to examine images of the plasma for physics phenomena such as . Applying graphite-based paint to the walls greatly reduces these reflections, giving physicists much better results to work with.

Read the whole article at .

The delegation from the Chinese Ministry of Science & Technology (MOST) that was received at ºÚÁÏÉçapp on 26 January also paid a visit to the International School in the neighbouring town of Manosque. Headed by Luo Delong, head of the Chinese Domestic Agency for ºÚÁÏÉçapp, and Sun Yuming, Deputy Director-General of the Executive Office at MOST, the delegation had a gift for the students in the Chinese section: four boxes of textbooks for primary school classes and picture books for pre-schoolers.

Of the 34 students in the Chinese section 21 are "ºÚÁÏÉçapp children"; the others are French nationals learning Chinese as second foreign language.

One of the biggest obstacles to making fusion power practical¡ªand realizing its promise of virtually limitless and relatively clean energy¡ªhas been that computer models have been unable to predict how the hot, electrically charged gas inside a fusion reactor behaves under the intense heat and pressure required to make atoms stick together.

The key to making fusion work¡ªthat is, getting atoms of a heavy form of hydrogen called deuterium to stick together to form helium, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process¡ªis to maintain a sufficiently high temperature and pressure to enable the atoms overcome their resistance to each other. But various kinds of turbulence can stir up this hot soup of particles and dissipate some of the intense heat, and a major problem has been to understand and predict exactly how this turbulence works, and thus how to overcome it.

A long-standing discrepancy between predictions and observed results in test reactors has been called "the great unsolved problem" in understanding the turbulence that leads to a loss of heat in fusion reactors. Solving this discrepancy is critical for predicting the performance of new fusion reactors such as the huge international collaborative project called ºÚÁÏÉçapp, under construction in France.

Now, researchers at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, in collaboration with others at the University of California at San Diego, General Atomics, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, say that they have found the key. In a result so surprising that the researchers themselves found it hard to believe their own results at first, it turns out that interactions between turbulence at the tiniest scale, that of electrons, and turbulence at a scale 60 times larger, that of ions, can account for the mysterious mismatch between theory and experimental results.

The new findings are detailed in a pair of papers published in the journals Nuclear Fusion and AIP Physics of Plasmas, by MIT research scientist Nathan Howard, doctoral student Juan Ruiz Ruiz, Cecil and Ida Green Associate Professor in Engineering Anne White, and 12 collaborators.

See the original story on .

Photo courtesy of the researchers.

The Kudowa Summer School "Towards Fusion Energy" takes place every two years in Kudowa Zdr¨®j, Poland.

Organized by the Institute of Plasma Physics and Laser Microfusion (IPPLM) and the International Centre for Dense Magnetised Plasma (ICDMP), the summer program is geared toward a multinational audience, principally PhD students but also Master's students and young scientists from all over Europe.

Courses focus on various aspects of fusion energy, plasma experiments, plasma modelling and technology for young scientists from different countries. The subject of the Kudowa Summer School in 2016 is: Power Exhaust in Fusion Plasmas.

The 2016 Kudowa Summer School will take place from 13 to 17 June 2016 (registration deadline 20 March). For more information, visit the dedicated .

From 8 to 11 February, the Monaco-ºÚÁÏÉçapp International Fusion Energy Days (MIIFED) will combine with the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Business Forum (IBF) to create a single event dedicated to ºÚÁÏÉçapp progress and upcoming business opportunities.

Over 400 participants from 200 companies have already registered for MIIFED-IBF 2016, which will be the sole event dedicated to industrial opportunities at ºÚÁÏÉçapp in 2016. The three-day conference will also feature an industrial and R&D exhibition.

It is still possible to schedule one-to-one meetings (B2B and B2C). These networking opportunities facilitate the exploration of partnership opportunities in the context of the technological challenges that lie ahead for ºÚÁÏÉçapp. To schedule a one-to-one meeting or to ask for business appointments (based on company profiles), please consult the pages dedicated to registered participants .

In combining ºÚÁÏÉçapp Business Forum with the MIIFED international event, the MIIFED-IBF2016 Conference is specifically designed to support enhanced communication with industry and ensure that ºÚÁÏÉçapp procurement practices will be efficient and supportive of its industrial partners. It also aims to facilitate productive interaction between industry and fusion laboratories from the seven ºÚÁÏÉçapp Members and to foster collaboration between those actors, especially in technical areas where strong cooperation is required.

See the conference  for more information or to register now.

Using Mira, physicists from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have uncovered a new understanding about electron behaviour in edge plasma. Based on this discovery, improvements were made to a well-known analytical formula that could enhance predictions of and, ultimately, increase fusion power efficiency.

Principal investigator C.S. Chang, head of the U.S. SciDAC-3 Partnership for Edge Physics Simulation headquartered at PPPL, and co-investigator Robert Hager recently gained new insight into the properties of a self-generating electrical current that boosts power in a tokamak fusion reactor, based on simulations run on the 10-petaflop IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer Mira located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in the US.

To develop the best predictive tools for ºÚÁÏÉçapp (and, by extension, other experimental fusion reactors), research teams are using high-performance computing to resolve the behaviours of fusion plasma across the many spatial scales that impact reactor efficiency and plasma stability.

Running on more than 260,000 Mira processing cores with excellent scalability, the latest XGCa plasma edge simulations revealed electron behaviours related to edge bootstrap current that are not accurately predicted for present-day tokamak geometry by the well-known Sauter formula, which is used to calculate values for the bootstrap current.

"Mira allows running simulations of larger tokamaks at ºÚÁÏÉçapp's scale, and modeling at much higher particle counts more accurately represents the electron populations in the plasma," said Tim Williams, Argonne computational scientist.

Read the full article on the of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.

Image: Based on a series of high-resolution simulations of bootstrap current in present-day tokamak geometries, researchers have modified a well-known formula that calculates the value of bootstrap current in order to improve the prediction of fusion efficiency in tokamak reactors. Credit: Kwan Liu-Ma, University of California, Davis.

What should have been a standard two-hour visit turned out to be a four-hour crash course in fusion. For the first time in the history of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project, a 29-person delegation from the African continent came to visit ºÚÁÏÉçapp this week. Taking part in a conference in Marseille on public-private partnerships in the energy sector, the lawyers, engineers and ministry representatives from Cameroun, Burkina Faso, Congo, Togo, Senegal, Kenya, the Ivory Coast, Maurice, Mali and Uganda seized the opportunity to spend an afternoon at ºÚÁÏÉçapp Headquarters, with a visit to the site and presentations on fusion science and technology and the organization of the world's largest International scientific collaboration. "What you are doing here is really amazing," Tarek Toko, from the West African Development Bank, said on the way back to the bus. "You must succeed!"

The organization charged with overseeing and coordinating the European Union's quest for fusion power, , plans to update during 2016 the European Union's 2012 strategic plan to put fusion electricity on the grid by 2050, according to Xavier Litaudon speaking at the annual meeting of the Fusion Power Associates on 16-17 December in Washington, DC.

ºÚÁÏÉçapp remains "the key facility of the roadmap" but the update will incorporate the impact of slippage in the ºÚÁÏÉçapp construction schedule. A new ºÚÁÏÉçapp schedule is expected to be approved by the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Council by mid-2016 according to ºÚÁÏÉçapp Director-General Bernard Bigot, who also spoke at the meeting.

The European Union's strategic plan reflects a collaboration with Japan on the "Broader Approach" to fusion that was a part of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp siting decision process. According to EUROfusion, in the course of the roadmap implementation the fusion program will move "from being laboratory-based and science-driven towards an industry- and technology-driven venture."

To ensure minimal delay to DEMO, the next step after ºÚÁÏÉçapp, the European Union has initiated a conceptual design system engineering approach that will address such issues as safety, tritium breeding, power exhaust, remote handling, component lifetime and plant availability, according to Litaudon. Experience gained from continued operation and "internationalization" of the JET tokamak and from devices JT-60SA (Japan), WEST (France) and Wendelstein 7-X (Germany) are also important elements of the plan.

Ed Synakowski, head of the US fusion program, told the audience that the US had recently completed the US fusion Strategic Plan requested by Congress in 2014. Permission from Congress was needed before the Plan could be released to the public, he said.

All talks from the Fusion Power Associates annual meeting, Strategies to Fusion Power, are posted at the .

Source:

Among the most feared events in space physics are solar eruptions, massive explosions that hurl millions of tons of plasma gas and radiation into space. These outbursts can be deadly: if the first moon-landing mission had encountered one, the intense radiation could have been fatal to the astronauts. And when eruptions reach the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth, the contact can create geomagnetic storms that disrupt cell phone service, damage satellites and knock out power grids.

NASA is eager to know when an eruption is coming and when what looks like the start of an outburst is just a false alarm. Knowing the difference could affect the timing of future space missions such as journeys to Mars, and show when steps to protect satellites, power systems and other equipment need to be taken.

(Photo NASA)

Read the whole article on the  website.

Momentum is building on the MAST Upgrade project at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) in the UK.

When completed, the upgrade of the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) will enable scientists to test the spherical tokamak design as a candidate for a Component Test Facility that will trial technology and materials in advance of the next-step machine; add to the knowledge base for ºÚÁÏÉçapp on key plasma physics issues; and test a high-power exhaust system known as a Super-X divertor.

The final phase of assembly will take place in 2016.

See the three-minute video on the CCFE .

Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have produced self-consistent computer simulations that capture the evolution of an electric current inside fusion plasma without using a central electromagnet, or solenoid.

The simulations of the process, known as non-inductive current ramp-up, were performed using TRANSP, the gold-standard code developed at PPPL. The results were published in October 2015 in Nuclear Fusion. The research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

In traditional donut-shaped tokamaks, a large solenoid runs down the centre of the reactor. By varying the electrical current in the solenoid scientists induce a current in the plasma. This current starts up the plasma and creates a second magnetic field that completes the forces that hold the hot, charged gas together.

But spherical tokamaks, a compact variety of fusion reactor that produces high plasma pressure with relatively low magnetic fields, have little room for solenoids. Spherical tokamaks look like cored apples and have a smaller central hole for the solenoid than conventional tokamaks do. Physicists, therefore, have been trying to find alternative methods for producing the current that starts the plasma and completes the magnetic field in spherical tokamaks. 

One such method is known as coaxial helicity injection (CHI). During CHI, researchers switch on an electric coil that runs beneath the tokamak. Above this coil is a gap that opens into the tokamak's vacuum vessel and circles the tokamak's floor. The switched-on electrical current produces a magnetic field that connects metal plates on either side of the gap.

Read more on the PPPL .

The 2015 roundup of news from the US ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project Office is now available online.

US ºÚÁÏÉçapp achieved a number of project "firsts" for delivery and fabrication over the last year. Deliveries to the ºÚÁÏÉçapp site included the first nuclear grade hardware (drain tanks) and the first highly exceptional load shipment to ºÚÁÏÉçapp (a 90-ton electrical transformer). The US also supplied the first plant components installed at the ºÚÁÏÉçapp site (a total of four transformers). On the fabrication side, US ºÚÁÏÉçapp shipped its first production toroidal field conductor to the coil manufacturer in Europe and has begun fabrication of the first central solenoid module.

Read all the news .

Fusion in Europe is a regular magazine on the progress of fusion research published by the consortium. In the December 2015 issue, the magazine takes a look at ongoing preparations for the deuterium-tritium campaign at JET, at the research planned on the upgraded spherical tokamaks MAST (UK) and NSTX (US), and at topical program news from fusion laboratories all over Europe.

Read the latest Fusion in Europe .

For the close of the year, EUROfusion¡ªthe European Consortium for the Development of Fusion Energy¡ªis highlighting 24 cutting-edge technologies that have either benefited from, or are the by-products of, fusion research.

Superconducting magnets, low-activation heat-resistant materials, high-tech filters, sophisticated computer codes ... work being carried out around the world on fusion science and technology is pushing known technologies to new levels or breaking new ground for the benefit of many other sectors and, ultimately, society at large.

Follow the Spinoff Advent Calendar on EUROfusion's .

Members of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) community are cheering the start of a long-anticipated physics experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. Two teams of PSFC researchers are collaborating on the Wendelstein 7-X device, the world's largest fusion experiment designed in the stellarator line of magnetic confinement fusion devices.

The PSFC has significant experience with a different configuration of magnetic confinement, having spent decades designing and running the Alcator series of high-magnetic-field tokamak experiments ¡ª the Alcator C-Mod device, located on campus, is the latest in that series. There are many similarities between the two designs, however. 

Both the tokamak and the stellarator seek to harness the energy released from the fusion of hydrogen isotopes to provide clean and safe electrical power. Both use helical (spiraling) magnetic fields to contain the hot plasma fuel in a donut-shaped chamber. In a tokamak, this field is generated both by external electromagnets and a large electrical current that is driven in the plasma itself. Driving and sustaining this plasma current, and its impact on stability and transport of energy and particles, is a major focus of the research at MIT.

The stellarator concept takes a different approach. First invented by the noted astrophysicist and fusion pioneer Lyman Spitzer of Princeton University in 1950, the stellarator provides the entire helical field through external electromagnets formed in highly complex and twisted shapes. 

Future experiments at W7-X will address the role that plasma turbulence plays in limiting overall performance, and PSFC researchers are working with the W7-X group to investigate this. One PSFC team ¡ª principal research scientist Jim Terry and postdoctoral researcher Seung-Gyou Baek ¡ª will develop a fast camera system for viewing light emitted from the plasma, and will make important measurements of turbulence near the edge of the plasma. The other team ¡ª physics professor Miklos Porkolab and staff scientist Eric Edlund ¡ª will develop a specialized interferometer for imaging density fluctuations deep in the hot plasma core. The issues surrounding turbulence are important in stellarators, as they are in tokamaks, since turbulence moves heat and particles across the confining magnetic field faster than would otherwise occur. Both teams expect to have first measurements during the 2017 experimental campaign.

Read the original article on PSFC's website .

The Russian Domestic Agency for ºÚÁÏÉçapp reports that two shipments recently left factories in Saint Petersburg and Podolsk for the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project.

The first shipment contains correction coil busbars¡ªthe components that connect magnet coils to their power sources¡ªas well as flexible links for busbar interconnections. These components were transported by truck (pictured) from the Efremov Institute (NIIEFA) in Saint Petersburg directly to the ºÚÁÏÉçapp site. The fabrication and supply of switching equipment, busbars and energy-absorbing resistors for the power supply and the protection of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp superconducting magnetic system add up to the most expensive, and one of the most complicated, systems falling within the scope of in-kind procurement from Russia (25 systems in all). In accordance with the busbar Procurement Arrangement, NIIEFA will manufacture and ship approximately 5.4 km of busbars with a total weight exceeding 500 tons.

In the second shipment, four lengths of poloidal field superconductor (two unit lengths of 720 metres and two of 414 metres) were loaded onto trucks at the Cable Institute (JSC VNIIKP) in Podolsk for delivery to the European jacketing line at Criotec (Chivasso, Italy). The conductors are destined for the ºÚÁÏÉçapp poloidal field coil magnet system.

-- Alexander Petrov, ºÚÁÏÉçapp Russia

On 4 December the Programme Manager of EUROfusion, Tony Donn¨¦, visited ºÚÁÏÉçapp and spoke to staff in the ºÚÁÏÉçapp auditorium.

EUROfusion is a consortium of 29 research organisations and universities from 26 European countries plus Switzerland that is collaborating to achieve Europe's Fusion Roadmap, which outlines the most efficient way to realize fusion electricity by 2050. ºÚÁÏÉçapp is the key facility on the road to fusion energy, and Professor Donn¨¦ stressed in his talk that everything possible must be done to support ºÚÁÏÉçapp construction, optimize ºÚÁÏÉçapp operation and ensure minimal delay to the next-phase device, DEMO.

Professor Donn¨¦ also advocated the extension of the European tokamak JET under an international regime in support of ºÚÁÏÉçapp. The prolonged use of JET as a risk-mitigation device for ºÚÁÏÉçapp and for the training of a generation of scientists, engineers and technicians for ºÚÁÏÉçapp could give the world fusion community access to deuterium-tritium plasmas approximately 10 years before ºÚÁÏÉçapp.

Read more about , Europe's , and .

The aim of the WEST project is to turn the Tore Supra tokamak (France) into a test bed for ºÚÁÏÉçapp, with an actively cooled ºÚÁÏÉçapp-like tungstendivertor.

Component installation is underway. The latest WEST Newsletter (#11) reports on the most recent milestone: the installation of the divertor coil casings. Two stainless steel rings constituting the housing for the conductor windings are now assembled and positioned inside the vacuum vessel at their nominal position. The building of the coil winding can now begin.

(Photo Christophe Roux CEA-IRFM)

Read all the latest from WEST in Newsletter 11 .