What’s New

15 June 2015

ITER news digest for the period of 8 June 2015 to 15 June 2015.

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Featured (4)

Of interest (3)

Press (5)

Featured

An exercise in safety

A three-day immersion in vacuum

Rider in the storm

A modern day Midas touch

Princeton's upgraded NSTX to be largest of its kind

The signature nuclear fusion experiment at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab is expected to relaunch this summer after being shuttered for upgrades for about three years.

When it reopens, the reactor there will be the most powerful of its kind in the world, lab directors say.

"We expect to start up probably toward the end of June. We'll do the initial tests that will get us toward research operations, and (research) will start later in the summer, let's say August time frame, maybe mid-September," said Adam Cohen, chief operating officer for the lab.

The National Spherical Torus Experiment, also known as NSTX, is a plasma in the shape of a cored apple heated to between 50 million and 100 million degrees.

The experiment's $94 million upgrade bought a stronger magnet for the plasma's nuclear reactor and a second neutral beam accelerator to heat plasma even further.

Read the whole article on the Newsworks website.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=482

Supercomputer, and researchers, pair up to shed light on material interactions

As part of a Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) project, a partnership between the US Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Research Leadership Computing Challenge and Fusion Energy Sciences programs, researchers are using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's (OLCF's) Titan supercomputer to try to get closer to producing sustainable fusion for electricity.

The project, led by Brian Wirth, a researcher with the University of Tennessee and DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, brings researchers from various organizations together to work on different aspects of the ITER experimental fusion reactor.

...

Wirth and his collaborators are using Titan, a Cray XK7 supercomputer capable of 27 petaflops, or 27 quadrillion calculations per second, to shed light on how fusion plasma interacts with the materials used to build the reactor. Specifically, they're investigating how tungsten—one of the toughest materials known—will be affected by the plasma over time.

As helium particles bombard the tungsten wall, they begin to form clusters within the material. Once a helium atom is embedded in the wall, it attracts other helium particles. When enough helium is bunched together, it can "knock out" a tungsten atom from its normal position within the material, forming a nanoscale cavity, or hole, within the tungsten.

Read the full report published on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's website here.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=481

ITER Director-General speaks out

Ten years ago this month, a group of industrial nations agreed on the location for the world's largest nuclear-fusion experiment: ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which they had decided to build jointly.

Today, roughly €4 billion worth of construction contracts and €3 billion in manufacturing contracts worldwide are underway and the first large components are being delivered to the site at St-Paul-lez-Durance in southern France.

Faced with slippage in the schedule—despite the best efforts of the more than 2,000 dedicated people working on ITER—in March 2015 the ITER Council moved to appoint Bernard Bigot, from France, to the top management position of the project.

In this Comment in Nature, published on 11 June, the new ITER Director-General explains how he will strengthen leadership and management to refocus the project's aim of harnessing nuclear fusion.