Of Interest archive

Australian-born physicist Peter Thonemann died on 10 February 2018 at the age of 100. Thonemann was the leader of the ZETA fusion project when in 1958 it was famously—and wrongly—declared that it had achieved nuclear fusion.

Thonemann, whose family descended from German emigrants, was born in 1917 in Melbourne, Australia. To pursue an academic career in physics, he moved to Oxford, England, in 1944 and became one of the early researchers in nuclear fusion. As head of fusion research at Oxford and later at Harwell, England, Thonemann played a key role in the Zeta fusion project at the time when it made international headlines.

In January 1958, the announcement that the Zeta toroidal fusion device had achieved nuclear fusion was greeted with great enthusiasm. Less than four months later, the British scientists leading the project had to retract their earlier pronouncements. Although fusion research initially suffered from this setback, the Zeta episode helped drive the secrecy out of nuclear fusion research and create the foundation for scientific cooperation in this field across national boundaries. (See also the recent Newsline article on the Zeta affair)

Thonemann moved on to become deputy director of the Culham Laboratory in the mid-1960s, today home of JET, the Joint European Torus. A few years later, in 1968, he became professor for physics at what is today the University of Swansea, Wales. Late in life, Thonemann turned his scientific curiosity to biology and conducted research on the E. coli bacterium.

Please read the full obituary of The Sydney Morning Herald here.

Taiyô Tenno is a young Japanese student on a world tour of "art masterpieces"; Soléane is "a scientist at heart," presumably French, who speaks perfect Japanese. They meet at Cézanne's workshop in Aix-en-Provence and soon find themselves seated at the terrace of Les Deux Garçons, the town's most elegant café.

Soléane speaks Japanese because her work in "energy research" implies a lot of "professional dealings with Japan." Taiyô Tenno is impressed, especially when Soléane explains that her work is about "duplicating the energy-generating process in the Sun and stars"...

The first manga on ITER—"A small sun on Earth"—has just been published by ITER Japan and is available in Japanese, French and English.

Visit this website to download the manga.

The International Zvenigorod Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion is an annual rendezvous near Moscow for fusion research specialists from Russia and abroad. For one week in April, recent achievements in high and low temperature plasma research, the field of controlled fusion, and the development of plasma and beam technologies are presented through lectures, short talks and poster presentations.

Russian participation in the ITER Project was reported at the "ITER Project: Step to future energy" portion of the program under the direction of Anatoly Krasilnikov, director of the Russian Domestic Agency. Representatives of the research centres and the industrial companies involved in the procurement of ITER systems and components were present to report on the challenging technical specifications of the packages under Russian responsibility and the benefits of participation in ITER for the Russian research infrastructure overall.

More on the annual conference here.

--ITER Russia

Drawing inspiration from the robotic tasks that will be faced at ITER during installation and maintenance activities, the annual ITER Robots contest challenges students of different ages to imagine, design, and program Lego robots. Launched in 2012 by Agence Iter France and the ITER Organization, the program is growing every year.

As Newsline reported last June, the 2017 ITER Robots competition involved 600 students from 27 schools organized into 46 teams. This year, the competition will expand to about 70 teams and also offer a new program—ITER Robots Junior—for primary age students in 4th, 5th and 6th grade (12 additional teams). And who better to help design the new junior competition than 14-year-old Camylle Jordan, who spent one week as an intern in ITER's Remote Handling Section.

According to Jean-Pierre Martins, the ITER remote handling engineer who supervised Camylle, "she solved every issue she encountered in a pragmatic manner." In addition to becoming familiar with the complexity of the ITER Project, Camylle had to adapt her programming skills to work with a Thymio robot and to learn the basics of SolidWorks ®, a Computer Assisted Design tool.

The young intern left the ITER engineers impressed with her efficiency and confidence. She successfully tested the proposed curriculum and competition design, proactively suggesting and demonstrating ways to improve the robot mission. She participated in the official kick-off meeting of the ITER Robots Junior challenge, interacting with people from ITER, Agence Iter France and the French education system (Education Nationale). And she found time to fit in a tour of the ITER worksite and virtual reality room, and to give an on-camera Facebook interview to student journalists.

Most importantly, she documented her progress systematically, keeping a logbook of written records, photos, and videos, to ensure the contribution of her workweek at ITER would not be lost.

Bernard Bigot, Director-General of the world's biggest nuclear fusion project, tells Brussels-based Science|Business the perpetually out-of-reach energy source is finally in sight—so long as Trump does not scale back US involvement.

Read the article published on 15 March here.

A research team at Princeton University has succeeded in significantly improving the quality of disruption predictions for a plasma in a tokamak fusion device through deep learning.

The team led by plasma physicist William Tang had access to the database of the Joint European Torus (JET) tokamak to demonstrate the potential of deep learning and neural networks in the analysis of large amounts of plasma disruption data. They fed more than a half-petabyte of information into their fusion recurrent neural nets (FRNN) deep learning software.

Through GPU-accelerated computing—i.e., the use of a graphic processing unit together with a CPU—disruption prediction improved dramatically in accuracy and speed. The Princeton team also demonstrated the scalability to over thousands of even more advanced GPUs.

According to Tang, this development holds a huge potential for accelerating scientific discovery through deep learning for fusion research.

Read the full article here.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has just released plans for a number of initiatives that will broaden its engagement in fusion research.

MIT has been a long-standing player in fusion research, receiving support primarily from the US Department of Energy that has included funding in three major experiments at MIT's Plasma Fusion and Science Center (PFSC). The last of these—the Alcator C-Mod tokamak—ended operations in 2016 after 23 years and approximately 33,000 plasma shots.

Now, in a renewed approach, researchers at MIT will be working with a newly formed company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, to combine the experience of a well-established lab with the more nimble and longer-term financing perspectives from the private sector.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is an independent, for-profit company created by former MIT staff and students for the accelerated commercialization of fusion energy.

Joint teams will be working to develop a new class of high temperature superconducting magnets, followed by the conception and construction of a compact 100 MW fusion experiment called SPARC, and finally a larger demonstration power plant. 

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has obtained $50 million in funding from the Italian energy company Eni, which is also a founding member of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Eni has also announced funding to the order of $2 million per year for PSFC's newly created Laboratory for Innovation in Fusion Technologies, which will focus on cutting-edge solutions for some of the challenges on the road to a steady-state fusion reactor.

Read more about the new initiatives on the MIT website.

If your PhD was awarded after 1 January 2015—or you are about to obtain one—you are eligible to apply for a Monaco/ITER Postdoctoral Fellowship.

The Fellowship Program is recruiting now for two-year terms beginning autumn 2018.

Since 2008, 25 young scientists and engineers have been able to participate directly in ITER, working on cutting-edge issues in science and technology with some of the leading scientists and engineers in each domain. The principal aim of the Research Fellowships, which are funded by the Principality of Monaco under a Partnership Agreement that was renewed in early 2018, is the development of excellence in research in fusion science and technology within the ITER framework.

The deadline for application is 1 March. All information can be obtained here.

In a recent report in Nuclear Fusion, an international team of researchers outlines an approach for using electron cyclotron heating to control instabilities known as "neoclassical tearing modes" that can cause magnetic islands to grow in, and perturb, the plasma.

Lead physicist Francesca Poli of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) worked with two of her colleagues and researchers from the ITER Organization, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany, and the Institute of Plasma Physics in Italy, to describe an approach that for the first time simulates the plasma, the magnetic islands and the feedback control from the electron cyclotron waves.

The current from the electron cyclotron waves (see related article in Newsline) has to be matched with the magnetic island. The simulations performed help to determine the maximum misalignment that can be tolerated and under which conditions experiments should be run.

Read the full article on the PPPL website.

An institute created at the Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research (DIFFER) to research remote maintenance technology for ITER has now been spun-off as a separate entity.

The Dutch Remote Handling Study Center (RHSC), founded in 2011 in collaboration with the company Heemskerk Innovative Technology, will continue to carry out tasks for ITER through the European Domestic Agency.

But its experience developing maintenance procedures for ITER components using remotely controlled robots will now be applied to a wider scope of applications, including industrial maintenance and health care.

Read the news on the DIFFER website.

A team led by MIT professor Anne White, Cecil and Ida Green Associate Professor in the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department, and Pablo Rodriguez Fernandez (pictured), a graduate student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, has conducted studies that offer a new take on the complex physics of plasma heat transport, and point toward more robust models of fusion plasma behaviour. The results of their work appear this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, in which Rodriguez Fernandez serves as first author.

To make fusion energy a reality, scientists must harness fusion plasma, a fiery gaseous maelstrom in which radioactive particles react to generate heat for electricity. But the turbulence of fusion plasma can confront researchers with unruly behaviours that confound attempts to make predictions and develop models. In experiments over the past two decades, an especially vexing problem has emerged: In response to deliberate cooling at its edges, fusion plasma inexplicably undergoes abrupt increases in central temperature.

These counterintuitive temperature spikes, which fly against the physics of heat transport models, have not found an explanation—until now.

Read the detailed account on the website of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

"Many basic science discoveries, while important by themselves and foundational in their fields, also yield spinoff applications or enabling technologies not envisioned by the scientists doing the original work. This is what makes investment in science like fusion energy research so powerful—the impact extends well beyond the laboratory."

This statement prefaces a new brochure issued by the US Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (Department of Energy) on the many areas of science and technology—modern electronics, lighting, communication, manufacturing, transportation—that have benefitted directly from research into fusion.

You can download the brochure here.

The chemical element lithium may just have found itself a new application. Scientists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) have found that lithium powder can reduce periodic instabilities in plasma when used to coat tungsten surfaces in fusion devices.

These instabilities are known as edge-localized modes (ELMs) and occur at the outer parts of the fusion plasma. ELMs develop regularly when the plasma enters what is known as high-confinement mode, or H-mode, which holds heat within the plasma more efficiently. ELMs can damage the divertor, a plasma-facing component that extracts heat and ash produced by the fusion reaction, and cause fusion reactions to fizzle.

The researchers also found that it became easier to eliminate ELMs as the experiments progressed, possibly requiring less lithium as time went on.

The results cause physicists to be confident that these techniques could also reduce ELMs in larger fusion devices that were designed to be compatible with lithium.

Read the full article on the PPPL website here.

February at ITER opened with a high-stakes visit from the Committee on A Strategic Plan for U.S. Burning Plasma Research. The Committee, operating under the auspices of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, has been charged with reviewing the overall state of magnetic confinement fusion research in the United States. A key outcome of the review is to be a recommended strategy for going forward—with or without ITER—in a way that preserves the US status as a leader in burning plasma research.

The Committee publicly released its interim report on 21 December 2017.

The main webpage for ITER news has evolved. Follow this address—https://www.iter.org/news—to find all the latest social media posts, announcements, articles, photos and videos.

The page serves as an aggregator; from there you can consult the full archive of press articles on ITER, scroll through photo galleries, dig more deeply into the Newsline archive for a research topic, or click on our live site cam.

Make it your bookmark today!

Spain and Croatia have announced they will join forces in preparation to host DONES, the DEMO Oriented Neutron Source facility. The specialized installation will help scientists to test materials in an environment of neutron irradiation similar to that of a demonstration fusion reactor (DEMO), the intermediate step from ITER to a commercial fusion reactor.

A scientific collaboration framework between Japan and Europe—the Broader Approach—is helping to pave the way to DONES by validating key technological concepts. The engineering validation and engineering design activities of IFMIF (the International Fusion Materials Facility) aim at producing a detailed, complete and fully integrated engineering design of fusion-relevant neutron source by validating the continuous and stable operation of prototypes for each IFMIF subsystem.

Research into materials with neutron-resistant properties is one of the key tasks laid out in the European Roadmap, Europe's guiding document to addressing the scientific and technological challenges on the way to adding fusion energy to Europe's future energy mix.

It has not yet been decided where DONES will be located. For Europe, Spain and Croatia have now agreed to propose Granada, Spain, as host. Should this not be possible for technical reasons, the project would be hosted in Moslavačka Gora, Croatia. A technical group of experts from both countries that evaluated both sides declared the Granada site as fully operational and acknowledged that construction works could start immediately.

Read the full article on the European Domestic Agency website.

Two months after the announcement of a £86 million government investment in the UK's nuclear fusion research program, the UK's Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) met with more than 80 industry stakeholders on 16 January in Oxford to present opportunities for the nuclear industry to get involved and secure major contracts with ITER.

The government investment will support the UKAEA's plan to build a National Fusion Technology Platform at its Culham Science Centre. The platform will consist of two centres of excellence which, according to the Head of the UKAEA, Ian Chapman, would help in making commercial fusion a reality:

- the Hydrogen-3 Advanced Technology (H3AT) centre to research how to process and store tritium, with a direct link to ITER's development;
- and the Fusion Technology Facilities (FTF) to develop thermal hydraulic tests for components under fusion conditions. 

Both centres open up opportunities for British industry. Partnering with UKAEA will support industry in preparing to bid for forthcoming multi-million-pound ITER contracts. 

Read the full article on the UKAEA website here.

While ITER takes shape, plasma physicists continue searching for answers to some rather tough questions. What causes a plasma to go from a weakly confined, turbulent state to a more defined and calmer state which is necessary for fusion to occur? Answering this question, scientists from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the University of California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology join forces to simulate tokamak plasmas.

With the help of a supercomputer located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) called Titan, the research team uncovered for the first time the basic physics behind a plasma's transition into the high-confinement or H-mode.

Future simulations will study the transition of a plasma into H-mode at ITER scale. An issue of crucial importance is the right balance between the core temperature of a plasma and the temperature at its edge, which will have an effect on the size of the plasma.

These simulations are of unprecedented scale. Only with such high-performance computing resources such as Titan involving over 18,000 graphic processing units (GPUs) and close to 300,000 central processing units (CPUs), can problems of such great scientific complexity and importance be addressed.

See the full article on the ORNL website here.

Early January, ITER's Director-General spoke with Foro Nuclear, the Spanish nuclear industry forum. The exchange covered the challenge of leading a multicultural project, the critical phase ahead as ITER begins assembly activities, and Bernard Bigot's conviction that there is nothing more exciting, more motivating, than contributing to a project that could change the course of civilization for hundreds of thousands of years.

Excerpts below

On managing one of the world's largest research projects:

I accepted the Council's offer at a crucial moment in ITER history, when the project was entering into manufacturing and preparations for assembly. This new phase required a new organization—one tailored to meet the double challenge of delivering an installation that is both a research facility and an industrial facility.  What we needed at that point and need even more today was integration.

ITER is a complex structure, with a central team here in France and seven "domestic agencies" emanating from the seven ITER Members that are responsible for the in-kind procurement of machine components and installation systems. To achieve this integration, we needed a clear, centralized decision-making process under the authority of the Director-General. This being established and accepted by all, we could move on, as "One ITER," to promote and establish a project culture based on shared values of excellence, adherence to commitments, adherence to schedule and budget, and careful and effective use of public funds. And all the while making safety and quality our highest priority.

On striving for excellence in a multicultural environment:

How do we achieve harmony and efficiency? Through mutual respect and the understanding that each culture has its own work habits, traditions and "best practices." However at the end of the day, after well documented debates, decisions have to be taken and implemented by all. The global world we live in has not erased national particularisms. But instead of seeing this as a problem, we see it as an asset: we are building a project culture in a way that takes advantage of the diversity of these "best practices" to achieve an optimal result. 

On considering a job at ITER:

I've often said that, when joining ITER you symbolically abandon your nationality. You become Iternational... Working at ITER is very demanding but it is also very rewarding. Can you think of something more exciting, more motivating, than contributing to a project that can change the course of civilization for hundreds of thousands of years?

On the importance of fusion

My conviction is that in the second half of this century, beyond 2060, we will have accumulated enough knowledge and experience to create a large fusion industry—just like in the past decades we have created an oil, gas or nuclear fission industry. But like with any of these industries, the decision will be both technical and political and rest in the individual governments' and investors' hands.

Follow these links to read the article in English or Spanish.

Bored with the Kardashians? Not interested in your regular TV program? You can now tune in to a new channel that will allow you to follow—in real time!—the construction of the Tokamak Complex.

Streamed from a video camera mounted 60 metres above platform level, the footage gives you an eagle eye's view of the ongoing activities in the Holy of Holies of the ITER Project —day and night, any day, any hour.

Follow this link to the ITER homepage.