ºÚÁÏÉçapp

The November issue of the US ºÚÁÏÉçapp News Update is available .

It includes a full review of the status of US procurement for ºÚÁÏÉçapp and excerpts from the July 2014 Statement of Ned Sauthoff, director of the US ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project Office, before the Subcommittee on Energy, Committee on Science, Space and Technology at the US House of Representatives.

​FuseNet, the European platform to coordinate and improve fusion education, has launched a new student support scheme in cooperation with and funded by the EUROfusion consortium:

- Support for Master students to go abroad for an internship in a fusion group or at a research institute. - Support for Master and PhD students to follow educational training activities external to their own organisation (such as summer schools, master classes and workshops with a dominant educational character). - Support for PhD students to take part in research at another universities' fusion group or at a research laboratory for shorter periods than a full internship. Being a member of FuseNet, the ºÚÁÏÉçapp is entitled to make use of this very attractive scheme by offering internships at ºÚÁÏÉçapp or research trips for PhD students. For more information please check the website.  

​On Friday 14 November, the first Highly Exceptional Load (HEL) destined to the ºÚÁÏÉçapp site was loaded onto the container ship CMA-Ivanhoe in the port of Busan, South Korea, to begin its five-week journey to France.

On board is the 87-ton main body of one high voltage substation transformer unit (part of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp steady state electrical network) as well as 39 wooden crates packed with the transformer's auxiliary components. The equipment was procured by the US and manufactured by Hyundai Heavy Industry in Ulsan, South Korea. Three identical transformers will be shipped to ºÚÁÏÉçapp in the coming months.   Ivanhoe should reach the Mediterranean harbour of Fos-sur-Mer on 19 December. There, the transformer main body will be unloaded and staged until 9 January 2015, when it will be transferred to a trailer.   The trailer will be loaded onto a barge to cross the inland sea Étang-de-Berre before travelling 104 kilometres along the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Itinerary, for delivery to  the ºÚÁÏÉçapp site in the early hours of 14 January.

​Some 135 researchers, graduate students, and staff members from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL, US)) joined 1,500 research scientists from around the world at the 56th annual meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics Conference from 27 to 31 October in New Orleans.

Topics in the sessions ranged from waves in plasma to the physics of ºÚÁÏÉçapp and women in plasma physics. Dozens of PPPL scientists presented the results of their cutting-edge research in magnetic fusion and plasma science. There were about 100 invited speakers at the conference, more than a dozen of whom were from PPPL.

Read the full article and access the topical press releases on the .

​With near-surgical precision, technicians at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL, US) hoisted the 29,000-pound (13,000-kilo) centre stack for the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade, NSTX-U, over a 20-foot (6-metre) wall and lowered it into the vacuum vessel of the fusion facility. The smooth operation on 24 October capped more than two years of construction of the centre stack, which houses the bundle of magnetic coils that form the heart of the $94 million (EUR 19 million) upgrade.

"This was really a watershed moment," said Mike Williams, the head of engineering and infrastructure at PPPL and associate director of the Laboratory. "The critical path [or key sequence of steps for the upgrade] was fabrication of the magnets, and that has now been done."

The lift team conducted the final steps largely in silence, attaching the bundled coils in their casing to an overhead crane and guiding the 21 foot-long (6.4-metre) centre stack into place. The clearances were tiny: the bottom of the casing passed just inches over the shielding wall and the top of the vacuum vessel. Inserting the centre stack into the vessel was like threading a needle, since the clearance at the opening was only about an inch. Guidance came chiefly from hand signals, with some radio communication at the end. Read the full article on the .

​Wildlife is thriving on the ºÚÁÏÉçapp site. Wild boars, mouflon goats and deer freely roam the vast expanses of forest that surround the installation.

This picture of two young does was taken last week by APAVE's Health and Safety Coordinator Laurent Feron, as he drove along the track leading to the Logistics Platform located behind the hill on the east side of the worksite.

These does are no ordinary animals — they are descendants of the of Sikka deer that were offered to French President Sadi Carnot by the Emperor of Japan Mutsuhito, the "Meiji Emperor", in 1890. The two couples were originally hosted in the Presidential Hunting Reserve near Paris. By 1928, the original four had become a small herd, and a few individuals were entrusted to various national parks and wildlife reservations. The National Forest in Cadarache was one of them. Eighty-six years later, the Emperor's deer are still here, scattered between the CEA-Cadarache enclosure, the National Forestry Commission reserve and the outskirts of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp site.  

​From 20-22 May 2015 the ENERGY, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Conference and Exhibition (EST-Energy) will be taking place at the Karlsruhe Convention Center in Germany.

The conference will focus on all energy-related topics with an emphasis on renewable and CO2-free forms of energy.

The establishment of a sustainable, reliable and achievable energy system needs a worldwide cross-linked effort. Research, development and implementation of innovations by both the scientific community as well as industry is necessary. EST-Energy 2015 aims to provide a platform for the most recent research findings and allow participants to network with other researchers and engineers from all over the world.

Fusion is one of the themes of the conference. A call for abstracts has been launched for topics that fall in the following categories: ºÚÁÏÉçapp- and DEMO-related issues, the development strategies of new fusion devices (W7-X, JT-60 SA... ), and technical issues that may be of interest to others.

The deadline for paper abstracts is 15 December 2014. All information can be found on the conference .

​Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers, in collaboration with General Atomics and the University of Arizona, have developed an infrared and visible camera viewing system that's able to produce wide-angle, tangential views of full poloidal (north-south direction of the ) cross-sections inside the tokamak. The camera's images provide researchers with data about the interior conditions of the DIII-D, which was built under contract for the US Department of Energy.

"We wanted to look inside the tokamak's chamber to see where things were heating up on the walls," said Kevin Morris, a designer with LLNL's National Security Engineer Division, who was part of the research team that developed the . "There are a lot of critical areas that are heated by the plasma, and researchers want to understand them better."   ... The camera system consists of a commercially available infrared camera, a fast visible camera and an optical system designed by a collaboration of physicists, engineers, optical designers and mechanical designers.   Their design will be used as a prototype for a set of larger cameras that will be built for ºÚÁÏÉçapp.

Read the full story on the LLNL website .

​Melvyn Bragg from "In Our Time" and his guests discuss nuclear fusion, the process that powers stars. In the 1920s physicists predicted that it might be possible to generate huge amounts of energy by fusing atomic nuclei together, a reaction requiring enormous temperatures and pressures. Today we know that this complex reaction is what keeps the Sun shining. Scientists have achieved fusion in the laboratory and in nuclear weapons; today it is seen as a likely future source of limitless and clean energy.

Guests:

Philippa Browning, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester

Steve Cowley, Chief Executive of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority

Justin Wark, Professor of Physics and fellow of Trinity College at the University of Oxford

Producer: Thomas Morris.

 

Listen to the 43-minute program that aired on 30 October 2014 (9:30 p.m.) .

​Where else would you like to study fusion science and engineering but in the heart of the Eternal City?

The second oldest public university in Rome, the University of Rome "Tor Vergata," has offered a Second Level Master course in Fusion Energy Science and Engineering since 2012. Open to postgraduates with a Master's degree or equivalent title, the course aims to train experts in the areas of machine operation, experimental practice both in magnetic confinement and inertial fusion, and fusion technology and engineering.

The next course starts on 2 February 2015. The duration of the course is one academic year but it can be extended to two academic years according to individual study plans. Enrolment is open now. For more information, see the dedicated , or contact: Dr. Colomba Russo Phone: +390672597201 Mail: @email

The latest issue of the European Domestic Agency's newsletter, F4ENews, has just been released. You can consult it .

​Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Germany have devised a new method for minimizing turbulence in bumpy donut-shaped experimental fusion facilities called stellarators. This month in a published in Physical Review Letters, these authors describe an advanced application of the method that could help physicists overcome a major barrier to the production of fusion energy in such devices, and could also apply to their more widely used symmetrical donut-shaped cousins called tokamaks. This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

Turbulence allows the hot, charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions to escape from the magnetic fields that confine the gas in stellarators and tokamaks. This turbulent transport occurs at comparable levels in both devices, and has long been recognized as a challenge for both in producing fusion power economically.   "Confinement bears directly on the cost of fusion energy," said physicist Harry Mynick, a PPPL coauthor of the paper, "and we're finding how to reshape the plasma to enhance confinement."   The new method uses two types of advanced computer codes that have only recently become available. The authors modified these codes to address turbulent transport, evolving the starting design of a fusion device into one with reduced levels of turbulence. The current paper applies the new method to the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, soon to be the world's largest when construction is completed in Greifswald, Germany.   Results of the new method, which has also been successfully applied to the design of smaller stellarators and tokamaks, suggest how reshaping the plasma in a fusion device could produce much better confinement. Equivalently, improved plasma shaping could produce comparable confinement with reduced magnetic field strength or reduced facility size, with corresponding reductions in the cost of construction and operation.  

Read the full report on the PPPL .

-- Magnetic field strength in a turbulence-optimized stellarator design. Regions with the highest strength are shown in yellow.

 

​Recent fusion experiments on the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics (California, US) and the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at MIT (Massachusetts, US), show that beaming microwaves into the centre of the plasma can be used to control the density in the centre of the plasma, where a fusion reactor would produce most of its power. Several megawatts of microwaves mimic the way fusion reactions would supply heat to plasma electrons to keep the "fusion burn" going.

The new experiments reveal that turbulent density fluctuations in the inner core intensify when most of the heat goes to electrons instead of plasma ions, as would happen in the center of a self-sustaining fusion reaction. Supercomputer simulations closely reproduce the experiments, showing that the electrons become more turbulent as they are more strongly heated, and this transports both particles and heat out of the plasma.   "We are beginning to uncover the fundamental mechanisms that control the density, under conditions relevant to a real fusion reactor," says Dr. Darin Ernst, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who led the experiments and simulations, together with co-leaders Dr. Keith Burrell (General Atomics), Dr. Walter Guttenfelder (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory), and Dr. Terry Rhodes (UCLA).   Read the full report on .     --Supercomputer simulation shows turbulent density fluctuations in the core of the Alcator C-Mod tokamak during strong electron heating. Credit: D. R. Ernst, MIT

​In order to improve project performance and in light of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project's specific managerial and cultural complexities, an External Management Advisory Board (EMAB) was established earlier this year. This week, the members of the EMAB convened for their first meeting at ºÚÁÏÉçapp Headquarters.

The objective of the EMAB is to advise the ºÚÁÏÉçapp's senior managers and the Director-General on enhancing project and safety culture, a challenging activity in the context of a mega international project with seven Members. Also, the Board is charged with assessing the practical implementation of the set of actions that was decided in response to the carried out in 2013.

The Chair of this new entity is Jean Jacquinot, who also serves as scientific advisor to the Chairman of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Bernard Bigot.

Other Board members are Michael Tendler, professor at Sweden's Alfvén Laboratory (Royal Institute of Technology); Richard Hawryluk, head of the department of ºÚÁÏÉçapp and Tokamaks at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (US); Dhiraj Bora, director of the Institute for Plasma Research, IPR (India); and Yuanxi Wan, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and former Chairman of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Science and Technology Advisory Committee (STAC). ºÚÁÏÉçapp's Colette Ricketts, of the System Management Section, is in charge of the secretariat.

"During our first meeting held on 20-21 October, we had a very fruitful discussion," the Board members reported after the first meeting. "We openly addressed issues such as the project's nuclear and safety culture, options for improved alignment between the ºÚÁÏÉçapp and the Domestic Agencies, and last but not least the creation of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Chief Executive Team, (ICET), formed to improve collaboration between all actors of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project."

The Board will continue to address key ºÚÁÏÉçapp management issues at its next meeting, scheduled for 11-12 December 2014.

​Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is organizing a colloquium on TFTR  of December 1993.

More information .

​Research by an international team led by SLAC and Stanford scientists has uncovered a new, unpredicted behavior in a copper oxide material that becomes superconducting — conducting electricity without any loss — at relatively high temperatures.

This new phenomenon — an unforeseen collective motion of electric charges coursing through the material — presents a challenge to scientists seeking to understand its origin and connection with high-temperature superconductivity. Their ultimate goal is to design a superconducting material that works at room temperature.   "Making a room-temperature superconductor would save the world enormous amounts of energy," said Thomas Devereaux, leader of the research team and director of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), which is jointly run with SLAC. "But to do that we must understand what's happening inside the materials as they become superconducting. This result adds a new piece to this long-standing puzzle."   The results were published 19 October in Nature Physics.

 

Read the full article on the SLAC .

​In the latest newsletter published by Korea's National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI), read how the KSTAR tokamak has topped 10,000 plasma generation experiments since 2009 and how tokamak technologies have found their way into applications in the food and defence industries.

The 7th issue of NFRI News is available .

​Russia is developing a hybrid nuclear reactor that uses both nuclear fusion and fission, said head of leading nuclear research facility. The project is open for international collaboration, particularly from Chinese scientists.

A hybrid nuclear reactor is a sort of stepping stone to building a true nuclear fusion reactor. It uses a fusion reaction as a source of neutrons to initiate a fission reaction in a 'blanket' of traditional nuclear fuel.

The approach has a number of potential benefits in terms of safety, non-proliferation and cost of generated energy, and Russia is developing such a hybrid reactor, according to Mikhail Kovalchuk, director of the Kurchatov Research Center.

"Today we have started the realization of a distinctively new project. We are trying to combine a schematically operational nuclear plant reactor with a 'tokamak' to create a hybrid reactor," he told RIA Novosti, referring to a type of fusion reactor design.

Photo:  Director of the Kurchatov Research Center Mikhail Kovalchuk  Read the whole story on the  website and also (in Russian) on the website.

​Manufacturing is underway in India for the acceleration grid power supplies that will be supplied to the SPIDER test bed in Italy as well as to ºÚÁÏÉçapp's diagnostic neutral beam.

  The technical specifications for both acceleration grid power supplies are similar (system rated for 96 kVDC, 75 A). The SPIDER test bed is designed to finalize the development of the ion sources required for the ºÚÁÏÉçapp neutral beam injectors and to test all essential aspects of the diagnostic neutral beam accelerator.   Following the Final Design Review held in August 2013 for the acceleration grid power supplies, a Manufacturing Readiness Review was conducted early this year at the Indian Domestic Agency with the participation of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp and ECIL, the Indian manufacturer responsible for the fabrication of the system and its installation at the SPIDER test bed in Padua, Italy.   Major components of the acceleration grid power supplies—60 kW water-cooled switched power supply modules and 2.8 MVA oil-cooled multi-secondary transformers—are presently being inspected at intermediate stages and the factory acceptance test for the first batch is scheduled for the end of November 2014.   Discussions are also being held with local support agencies for SPIDER site works with coordination assistance from the Consorzio RFX team in Padua.   Dilshad Sulaiman, ºÚÁÏÉçapp India      

The German science and engineering website recently featured a three-hour audio interview of ​ºÚÁÏÉçapp physicist Richard Pitts. The program focuses on the physics and the engineering challenges of ºÚÁÏÉçapp, but also addresses some of the unique organizational aspects of the project.