What’s New

10 March 2014

ITER news digest for the period of 3 March 2014 to 10 March 2014.

Subscribe to the newsletter

Your email address will only be used for the purpose of sending you the ITER Organization publication(s) that you have requested. ITER Organization will not transfer your email address or other personal data to any other party or use it for commercial purposes.

If you change your mind, you can easily unsubscribe by clicking the unsubscribe option at the bottom of an email you've received from ITER Organization. modification test

For more information, see our Privacy policy.

Select your newsletters:

ITER Newsline
Keep in touch with ITER through our main news feed, sent weekly.

ITER Magazine - French only
Learn more about the ITER Project by subscribing to this quarterly online magazine (in French) that is geared toward the general public.

ITER Open Doors Day - Notifications
Stay informed about the ITER Open Doors sessions and be among the first to subscribe to the next event.

Please enter your email address:

Rss Feed

Featured (4)

Of interest (5)

Press (8)

Featured

Springtime construction boom

Chinese technology will contribute to heating ASDEX-U

Cryostat crane now installed

Featured

What's on TV?

Dhiraj Bora on fusion

Dhiraj Bora, present Director of the Institute for Plasma Research, Gujarat and former ITER Deputy-Director General, explains what a fusion reaction is, what conditions it requires, and what hurdles scientists face in achieving it.

Read Prof. Dhiraj Bora's interview here.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=261

Spitzer: Fusion Vs Fission

When a science-mad artificial intelligence system (voiced by GLaDOS actress Ellen McLain) is installed at NASA, two hapless computer technicians learn the process behind nuclear fusion in the Sun, and how it differs from fission.

Watch the video here.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=260

Major U.S. Science Agencies Face Flat Prospects

President Barack Obama this morning released a $3.901 trillion budget request to Congress, including proposals for a host of federal research agencies.

(...)

Once again there are winners and losers in the proposed budget for 2015 the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, the single largest funder of the physical sciences in the United States. Overall, the Office of Science budget would creep up by just 0.9% from its current level to $5.111 billion. But whereas some research programs, such as advance computing, would see double-digit increases, others, such as fusion, would take deep cuts. (...)

In contrast, the fusion program would take a 17.6% cut to $416 million—$88 million less than it's getting this year. Although far from final, the numbers suggest another big dip for a program that has enjoyed a roller coaster ride in recent years. In its proposed 2013 budget, DOE called for slashing spending on domestic fusion research to help pay for the increasing U.S. contribution to the international fusion experiment, ITER, in Cadarache, France. That budget also called for closing one of three smaller fusion experiments, or tokamaks, in the United States, the Alcator C-Mod at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. But that budget never passed and last December, when Congress finally agreed to a budget for this year, it restored funding for C-Mod and gave the fusion program a handsome boost of nearly $200 million. The new budget request would give some of that increase back and suggests DOE officials see bigger priorities elsewhere.

Read full article on Science website.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=256

WEST Newsletter Feb. issue

In Cadarache, France, the CEA-Euratom tokamak Tore Supra is undergoing a major transformation to be used as a test bench for ITER. This is the WEST project (W - for tungsten - Environment in Steady-state Tokamak).

The February issue of the WEST newsletter is now available online.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=253

Physicists start thinking beyond the LHC, consider reviving the SSC

Will particle physicists ever have a new toy that will take them to energies beyond those accessible through the Large Hadron Collider? History suggests it's unlikely. To save costs, the LHC was built in an existing tunnel that had hosted an earlier, less powerful accelerator. The US cancelled the construction of hardware that would have outperformed the LHC (the Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC) due to cost overruns, and it shut down its Tevatron once the LHC started up. Now, decisions on the linear collider that will be used to study the Higgs in detail are being made based on which country is likely to come up with the most money.

But physicists are apparently an optimistic bunch. Earlier this year, CERN announced that it was beginning to evaluate an LHC replacement that would require a tunnel so large—100km in circumference—that it would have to pass under Lake Geneva itself. Potentially in response, a team of US-based physicists have come up with an even more audacious plan: don't build the linear collider, resurrect the SSC's now abandoned tunnels, and use them to both host a Higgs factory and as a booster for a truly massive, 270km collider.

Read the full article on Ars Technica website.