What’s New

27 January 2014

ITER news digest for the period of 20 January 2014 to 27 January 2014.

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Rss Feed

Featured (5)

Of interest (8)

Press (6)

Featured

Warm concrete in the chilly dawn

Chinese installation tests the juice

Strengthening ties with academia

Tricky joints

Evaluating the ITER magnets at SULTAN

What would happen if ocean water was replaced with deuterium oxide?

Deuterium oxide has properties that are quite different from light water, the normal water we deal with every day. In general, it will be more dense, have a higher freezing point and boiling point, higher viscosity, higher activity, and most importantly, a higher heat of vaporization and heat of fusion. Check out this chart on Wikipedia to compare the differences.

If the change happened suddenly, then there would be all sorts of problems...

Read more on Slate website.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/fr/of-interest?id=11076

Calm solar cycle prompts questions about impact on Earth

The surface of the sun has been surprisingly calm of late, with fewer sunspots than anytime in the last century, prompting curious scientists to wonder just what it might mean here on Earth.

Sunspots have been observed for millennia—first by Chinese astronomers and then, for the first time with a telescope, by Galileo in 1610.

The sunspots appear in roughly 11-year cycles—increasing to a daily flurry and then subsiding drastically, before amping up again.

But this cycle, dubbed cycle 24, has surprised scientists with its sluggishness.

The number of spots counted since it kicked off in December 2008 is well below the average observed over the last 250 years. In fact, it's less than half.

New antenna spreads good vibrations in fusion plasma

If you want to catch a firefly, any old glass jar will do. But when you're trying to bottle a star-the goal of fusion energy research-the bottle needs to be very special. A tokamak is one type of fusion bottle, capable of holding extremely hot plasma (10 times hotter than the sun) and keeping it stable while harvesting the prodigious amounts of energy produced in the fusion process. Of course, the trick is to keep the hot stuff in. And this is a complicated task.

Extreme-scale plasma turbulence simulation

As the global energy economy makes the transition from fossil fuels toward cleaner alternatives, fusion becomes an attractive potential solution for satisfying the growing needs. Fusion energy, which is the power source for the sun, can be generated on earth, for example, in magnetically-confined laboratory plasma experiments (called "tokamaks") when the isotopes of hydrogen (e.g., deuterium and tritium) combine to produce an energetic helium "alpha" particle and a fast neutron — with an overall energy multiplication factor of 450:1.

Read more on HPC ( High Productivity Computing) web site.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/fr/of-interest?id=11079

Reports from the 55th APS meeting in Denver

The 55th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Plasma Physics concluded on 15 November in Denver, Colorado. Reports of some of the most exciting plasma physics developments reported at the meeting can be consulted at the APS press release page.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/fr/of-interest?id=11080

PPPL scientists present cutting-edge results at major physics meeting

More than 1,500 researchers, including scientists from the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), gathered in Denver, Colorado this week for the 55th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's (APS) Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) for a five-day conference concluding 15 November.

PPPL scientists will present a host of cutting-edge results at the conference from their latest experiments and theoretical advances in fusion and plasma science.

Read more about these results on the PPPL website.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/fr/of-interest?id=11081

Our thermonuclear tomorrow

Russian Public TV recently aired this 38-minute documentary on the history of fusion research and on the present state of collaboration within ITER.

Click here to view "Our thermonuclear tomorrow" (in Russian)

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/fr/of-interest?id=11082

Uniform energy spread could prevent tokamak disruptions

Researchers at the 55th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Plasma Physics this week have reported on efforts at the Alcator C-Mod and DIII-D experiments to investigate ways of dispersing the energy of disruptions.

Results suggest that the rotation of instabilities spreads the heat more evenly than the injection of gases like argon or neon. The rotation, which appears to be driven by smaller-scale instabilities, ends up moving the radiating regions around the vessel quickly and thus lowering the average heat load. Further research will determine if scientists can control or encourage this spontaneous rotation, and thus distribute the heat more uniformly to the wall.

Read the full article and access the APS abstracts at Science 2.2.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/fr/of-interest?id=11083