ºÚÁÏÉçapp

​​In theory, it's possible to shoot some energy at hydrogen and get even more energy back. The process is called thermonuclear fusion, and if we could ever get fusion power to work — a big if — we'd never have to worry about our energy problems again.
It's not a completely crazy notion. Nuclear fusion already takes place in the sun's core, after all. And the promise of fusion power has led researchers to try their best for decades upon decades. Occasionally, they even make some advances — as happened this past winter, when scientists got closer to fusion power than ever.

Trouble is, the scientific and technical hurdles ahead are still enormous — in fact, we still don't have a full grasp on what all the hurdles might be. Still, the potential pay-off is so massive that countries have sunk billions and billions of dollars into fusion research.

So here's a guide to how far humanity has come on thermonuclear fusion — and how far we still have to go.

Read more on Vox .

On this day in 1984, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II​​ offically inaugurated the installation at Culham Center for Fusion Energy. EFDA,  the European Fusion Development Agreement, has just posted a of the opening, featuring the Queen's address to the guests, among whom French President François Mitterrand and Gaston Thorn, president of the European Commission.

​Interested in a career in fusion? Want to gain practical experience in a European working environment?

The European Domestic Agency for ºÚÁÏÉçapp, Fusion for Energy (F4E), is offering two-to-three month summer internships at its offices in Barcelona, Spain for EU or Swiss nationals aged 18-25 who are following university studies.

Applications can be filled out online at: . The deadline for submission is 25/04/2014 at midday CET.

​From 22-26 September, a Physics School will be organized by the Germany Physical Society DPG at the Physikzentrum in Bad Honnef, Germany with the theme "The Physics of ºÚÁÏÉçapp." The invited speakers and range of subjects will represent the wide range of expertise from the EU Fusion Programme. The Physics School targets young physicists at the early stage of their career but will also attract physicists from all fields and fusion scientists.

The Physics School, strongly supported by the Heraeus Foundation, provides an affordable opportunity to deepen knowledge in fusion-oriented physics with a special concentration on ºÚÁÏÉçapp.   More information can be found at the dedicated .

​The ºÚÁÏÉçapp project is truly at the frontier of knowledge, a collective effort to explore the tantalizing future of free, clean and inexhaustible energy offered by nuclear fusion. Where the Large Hadron Collider at CERN pushes the boundaries of physics to find the origins of matter, the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project seeks to give humans an endless stream of power which could have potentially game-changing consequences for the entire planet.

Read the article on website.

​Director of Agence Iter France, former director of JET (2000-2006) and former head of the European Fusion Development Agreement EFDA (2006-2009), Jérôme Pamela was recently appointed co-president of Eurofusion.

The new consortium, which succeeds EFDA, is the answer of the European fusion community to the new challenges of the "ºÚÁÏÉçapp era." It aims at streamlining the fusion programs of the European laboratories and installations in order to contribute to ºÚÁÏÉçapp with maximum efficiency.   "We also have to prepare for DEMO, the 'demonstration installation' that will come after ºÚÁÏÉçapp," explains Jérôme Pamela,  "and to train a new generation of physicists who will operate ºÚÁÏÉçapp and build DEMO."   Jérôme will be co-presiding Eurofusion alongside Sybille Günter, director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, IPP Garching.   Photo © AIF - V. Paul

​Two recently published books describe the history of nuclear fusion research. Search for the Ultimate Energy Source: A history of the US Fusion Energy Program (Springer, 2013) is written by Stephen Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, a nonprofit advocacy organization. Dean is also a former administrator of the US Department of Energy's fusion research program. Science magazine deputy news editor Daniel Clery's A Piece of the Sun: The Quest for Fusion Energy (Overlook Press, 2013), provides a more global perspective on the same subject.

Physics Today both books together in March and recently caught up with the authors to discuss their respective works.
 

Read the interview on website.

​The European Domestic Agency, with responsibility for the construction of the 39 buildings of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp installation, launched its first video on YouTube four years ago. Since then, over 100,000 viewers have followed its regular postings on site progress, industry collaboration and manufacturing.

Find out more .

​An exposition on ºÚÁÏÉçapp is running from now until 8 June at the Cité des Sciences (Parc de la Villette, Paris). Combining different media—display panels, videos, interviews—the exposition is designed to interest a wide public, including a younger audience.

See the Cité des Sciences for more information (in French).

​The ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project is present at this week's NewGen—Future Energy forum in Moscow, where industry and political actors from Russia and abroad debate innovation in energy. 

Anatoly Krasilnikov, head of ºÚÁÏÉçapp Russia, led a round table on 26 March titled "Innovative Discussions in the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project" with participation from the Troitsk Institute for Innovation and Fusion Research (TRINITI) and the Tokamak Physics Institute at the Kurchatov Institute.

One topic of discussion was the readiness to begin designing "fusion-fission" hybrid energetics in Russia. "Today we've got everything to start designing," said the deputy director of the Tokamak Physics Institute, Boris Kuteev. "Together with the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project, the implementation of a hybrid project would significantly contribute to creation of a fusion power plant in future."

​Researchers of the FOM Institute  have discovered that the wall material of a fusion reactor can shield itself from high energy plasma bursts. The wall material tungsten seems to expel a cloud of cooling hydrogen particles that serves as a protective layer. The research team publishes their results on 24 March 2014 in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

[...] The heart of a fusion reactor like ºÚÁÏÉçapp contains an extremely hot plasma, from which short, intense energy bursts rain down on the reactor wall. In ºÚÁÏÉçapp, the tungsten wall will face powerful discharges of several gigawatts per square meter, several times per second.  However, researchers at FOM Institute DIFFER discovered that under some conditions less than half of that incoming energy actually hits the surface.

The physicists used their linear plasma experiment  to show that the tungsten surface shields itself from the blast by expelling a cloud of cooling hydrogen particles. This is the first time that fusion researchers see the energy pulses and the wall react to each other at this level of detail.

Caption: Hydrogen plasma in DIFFER's linear plasma generator Pilot-PSI. Credit: Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM)

Read more on the .

 

 

​With a combined morning and evening circulation of more than 14 million, the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun is number one among the world's biggest selling newspapers.

Last Friday 21 March the Yomiuri dispatched one of its science reporters, Kyoichi Sasazawa, to the ºÚÁÏÉçapp site. The reporter met with ºÚÁÏÉçapp Director-General Osamu Motojima and ºÚÁÏÉçapp DDG Carlos Alejaldre and visited the ºÚÁÏÉçapp construction site. "In Japan, knowledge of fusion needs to be improved," he observed.

The article he's preparing will be published in Japan in late April and will also appear in the of the Yomiuri.

Caption: DG Motojima and Yomiuri science writer Kyoichi Sasazawa take in the Tokamak Pit view from the Assembly Hall slab.

 

​Twenty five years ago, University of Utah scientists announced a discovery that touched off a worldwide sensation.

"Basically, we've established a sustained nuclear fusion reaction by means which are considerably simpler than conventional techniques," said Professor Stanley Pons on 23 March 1989. He was describing an experiment on the Utah campus that sent waves of optimism around the globe.   Some thought so-called "cold fusion" would solve the world's energy problems and lead to widespread peace and prosperity. But it wasn't long before those hopes crumbled. At least one prominent scientist later denounced it as "the scientific fiasco of the century."

Read more . 

Lawrence Livermore scientists have modeled actinide-based alloys, such as spent nuclear fuel, in an effort to predict the impact of evolving fuel chemistry on material performance.

This work, funded by a Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program on "Scientific Basis for Ultra-high Burn-up Nuclear Fuels," could have direct implications for the use of as another source of energy.

Despite the limited availability of experimental thermodynamic data, this new approach can predict important features contained in phase diagrams, namely phases and their stability in composition-temperature domains and microstructures, and more importantly, guide and motivate further experiments for validating the methodology and the data for subsequent modeling of materials performance at higher scale, according to Patrice Turchi, lead author of a review paper appearing in the March issue of the Journal of the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (JOM).

Read the full article .

​Diamonds are highly sought after as jewelry and as a form of capital investment. They are also prized by the research community, but not because of their brilliance or symbolic significance — it is their physical properties that make these gems precious to scientists.

Diamonds are extremely hard, have unrivaled thermal conductivity and have a broadband spectral transparency that stretches from ultraviolet to far infrared, making them the ideal material for a host of different applications. Consequently, there is a large market for synthetic diamonds: they can cut through steel as if it were paper, dig their way through the earth on the tips of drilling heads, are used as scalpels in operations and can act as bio-electrochemical sensors for detecting substances such as DNA.

Read more .

​Holi Hai!!  

Holi, the Indian festival of colours (also known as the festival of love), is a celebration of the arrival of Spring. The festival symbolizes happiness and brings together families and friends for delicious food and lots of fun.   On Sunday, 16 March near Manosque, nearly 50 people—ºÚÁÏÉçapp staff from India, friends and families—gathered to celebrate this most colourful holiday.

 

 

 

​During a recent visit to China, ºÚÁÏÉçapp Director-General Osamu Motojima met with high-level representatives of government and had the opportunity to visit some of the factories where fabrication is underway on components within the Chinese scope.

On March 5, 2014, Vice Minister Jianlin Cao of MOST, head of the Chinese delegation to the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Council, received the Director-General and colleagues Ju Jin, ºÚÁÏÉçapp Deputy Director-General, Sachiko Ishizaka, Secretary to the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Council, and members of the Project Control Division for an exchange of views on recent developments in the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Project. The following day, the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Director-General visited the headquarters of China National Nuclear Corporation in Beijing, meeting with Chief Engineer Zengguang Lei and ºÚÁÏÉçapp Management Advisory Committee (MAC) Chair Jiashu Tian.   During his three-day stay he was also able to pay visits to Western Superconducting Technologies in Xi'an City, the company responsible for the manufacturing of ºÚÁÏÉçapp superconducting strand, and Nantong Shenhai Science and Industrial Technology, responsible for the surface-plating of ºÚÁÏÉçapp niobium-tin and niobium-titanium superconducting strands.  

​In the Spring issue of InFusion, a publication from the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), Mike Walsh, head of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp Diagnostic Division and Neill Taylor, former Division head of Nuclear Safety and Analysis, reflect on their experiences at ºÚÁÏÉçapp.  

Read it  (p.12-13).

 

 

​One of the people responsible for the manufacture of the magnet system at the heart of ºÚÁÏÉçapp presented a special guest seminar recently to staff and students at the Australian Institute for Innovative Materials.

Arnaud Devred, Superconductor Systems and Auxiliaries Section leader at ºÚÁÏÉçapp, is responsible for the in-kind procurement of the superconducting cable-in-conduit conductors which are expected to cost around $US1 billion, about half of the whole cost of the ºÚÁÏÉçapp magnet system.

Read the original article

​Without the moon, we probably wouldn't exist.  In that sense, the moon's value is infinite -- but what if you wanted to put a dollar amount on that rock? Most scientists think the rock is made up of elements like iron and magnesium, but the most valuable part of its structure may be Helium-3. Hard to find on Earth, the isotope can power nuclear fusion reactors, a potentially mammoth .

 

Read the full article .