Of Interest archive

Follow Sky News presenter Thomas Moore as he explores the promise, the science, and the construction of the "world's largest science experiement."

Watch the three-minute video here.

Can ITER be the answer to the world's energy needs? A team from Al Jazeera Paris came on site in October to find out. After descending into the depths of the Tokamak Complex, interviewing the ITER Director-General and site specialists, and observing daily activities at ITER Headquarters over two days, team prepared a report that concludes with:

"Critics say there's a risk that ITER won't work or will never lead to fusion energy being commercially viable ... But if it does work it could help save the planet from climate change and prove the power of the human imagination. For those here, it's a gamble worth taking." 

Watch it here.

Want to see what the ITER platform will look like when all the buildings are complete? Check (and play with) this spectacular 3D model developped by the European Domestic Agency F4E. (Works best on Chrome)

As part of an investment made last year by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) to launch a fusion technology platform at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), the "Fusion Technology Facilities" (FTM) centre of excellence will house a suite of equipment designed to test fusion components under combined thermal, mechanical, hydraulic and magnetic loads representative of future fusion power stations.

In the build-up period, the team is establishing links to promote knowledge sharing and to support an ambitious industry-related research program. CCFE has just announced that a strong collaboration is planned between the Materials Technology Laboratory at FTM and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bristol (UK). The establishment of complementary test equipment at Bristol and the funding of a joint post-doctoral research position are part of the agreement.

Read more at CCFE and the University of Bristol.

In the latest edition of Fusion in Europe, young volunteer writers imagine what a future with fusion might look at.

Download the magazine here. 

On 21 September, Carlos Alejaldre, who was an ITER Organization Deputy-Director-General from 2006 to 2015, was appointed Director-General of CIEMAT (Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas), the Spanish public research agency focused on energy and the environment.

A plasma physicist by training, Carlos has held several important positions in fusion research. Prior to joining ITER, he headed CIEMAT's national fusion laboratory (1992-2004)and was for two years (2004-2006) the director general of technological policy at the Spanish ministry of Education and Science.

More on the CIEMAT website (in Spanish).

New cameras are capturing detailed images of fusion energy experiments at the Joint European Torus at Culham. The cameras are actually outside the machine hall and relay video back from the heart of the 100-million-degree plasma via a set of mirrors. The footage will be used by EUROfusion scientists in forthcoming experiments to monitor JET's operation and to carry out studies on the plasma's behaviour and properties. The video shows the comparative view from two identical cameras: one located outside the bioshield wall (left) and one inside the Torus Hall (right).

ITER proves that we can collaborate for the common good, film maker Mila Aung-Thwin says in an interview with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Ahead of its 62nd General Conference which will take place from 17-21 September 2018 in Vienna, Austria, the IAEA interviewed Aung-Thwin about his award-winning documentary Let There Be Light. The feature-length film tells the story of dedicated scientists and their pursuit of nuclear fusion as a future source of clean, safe and abundant energy.

Aung-Thwin explains how his fascination with the human side of science and his interest in energy issues let him to explore the field of fusion and the many fusion projects worldwide. "The film is meant to illuminate some of the approaches to fusion, some of the challenges, as told by unique individuals," he says.

Along with ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot and Scientific Director of IPP Sibylle Günter, film director Aung-Thwin will be in Vienna next week and will speak at the General Conference's session on "Fusion Energy for Peace and Sustainable Development" on 18 September.

The session will be followed by a showing of the fusion documentary Let There Be Light .

The documentary is available worldwide on Vimeo for purchase and rent both in English and French. In North America it is also available on iTunes and Amazon.

In this recent video, ITER global logistics provider DAHER takes us through the different phases and challenges of transporting massive ITER components from their manufacturing location, sometimes half way across the world, to the project's construction site in southern France.

A team around physicist Jong-Kuy Park of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has made significant progress in tackling a common instability in fusion plasmas called edge localized modes or ELMs.

Bursts of ELMs, energy releases likened to solar flares, can slam into the walls of a tokamak and potentially cause damage. In order to prevent these EMLs from occurring, scientists produce small magnet ripples called resonant magnetic perturbations, or RMPs, that disturb the plasma and release excess pressure. As there are many potential magnetic distortions, it is a difficult task to create the right kind of beneficial distortions.

Park's team of scientists from the United States and the National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI) in Korea has "successfully predicted the entire set of beneficial 3D distortions for controlling ELMs without creating more problems," says a PPPL article.

The predictions were validated at the Korean Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) facility. Its advanced magnetic controls for generating precise 3D distortions made KSTAR the ideal testing device.

The research findings, published as a paper in Nature Physics, will be important for ITER--a device that will employ dedicated magnets to produce 3D distortions to control ELMs.

The colour-shaded areas on the plasma illustrate the beneficial magnetic distortions, while the thin lines in pink and purple surrounding the plasma represent the 3D field coils that generate the distortions. Credit: Jong-Kyu Park, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

Get your DVR ready! The US TV channel History is kicking off "Project Impossible," an original series that follows a new generation of epic engineering projects that were considered unthinkable just a few years ago.

The first episode to air—Biggest Engineering Breakthroughs—will feature the world's fastest motorcycle (it's electric), a train that travels faster than the speed of sound, and ITER—a power plant that creates a small Sun on Earth.

The first episode airs on 12 September. Check your local listings as episode times may vary.

Watch the trailer here.

Korea's superconducting tokamak KSTAR has run successfully since 2008. In December 2016, the machine produced a record 70-second high-performance plasma (H-mode) and achieved record-length periods of ELM suppression the following year.

Although smaller and different in detailed design, the Korean machine has built an extremely valuable database for the future operation of ITER.

On 4 September, KSTAR passed an important milestone: at 11:20 a.m., the machine produced its 20,000th plasma shot—all of them achieved without accident or major repair.

Read more (in Korean) here.

The Landau-Spitzer Award on the Physics of Plasmas for "outstanding contributions to plasma physics" is jointly sponsored by the Plasma Physics Divisions of the American Physical Society (APS) and the European Physical Society (EPS).

The Award is given to an individual or group of researchers for outstanding theoretical, experimental or technical contribution(s) in plasma physics and for advancing the collaboration and unity between Europe and the USA by joint research or research that advances knowledge which benefits the two communities in a unique way. The award may be given to a team or collaboration of up to four persons affiliated with either the European or US institutions.

The 2018 recipients are:

Yevgen Kazakov, Laboratory for Plasma Physics of the Royal Military Academy (LPP-ERM/KMS), Brussels, Belgium
Jozef Ongena, Laboratory for Plasma Physics of the Royal Military Academy (LPP-ERM/KMS), Brussels, Belgium
John. C. Wright, MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, USA
Stephen J. Wukitch, MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, USA

The winners were selected "for experimental verification, through collaborative experiments, of a novel and highly efficient ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH) scenario for plasma heating and generation of energetic ions in magnetic fusion devices."

-- From left to right : Yegven Kazakov, Jef Ongena (with the first wall of JET as background)and Steven Wukitch, John Wright (with the first wall of Alcator C-Mod as background)

For more detail on the winners and their work please see the APS announcement, the LPP-ERM/KMS website, and MIT News.

Titans of Nuclear is a podcast featuring interviews with experts on nuclear energy by self-described engineer, robotics entrepreneur, and climate change thought leader Bret Kugelmass. In one of the most recent podcasts, Kugelmass interviews ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot on his experience in the nuclear field in France, the fundamentals of fusion energy, and the status of the ITER Project and its potential importance to the future of energy ...

Click here to listen to the 43-minute podcast.

The Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) is partnering with a group of leading universities to advance understanding of one of the hottest topics in fusion research: turbulence in tokamak plasmas.

The £5 million-plus research program, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), will be led by a consortium of universities with a strong fusion focus—York, Oxford, Strathclyde and Warwick—and will work in partnership with Culham.

A tokamak operates by using a strong magnetic field to hold the hot fusion fuel—which is in the plasma state—away from the reactor walls. In practice the plasma in tokamak experiments is highly turbulent, and this turbulence increases the loss of heat and particles, degrading the fusion performance. If the turbulence can be reduced, this could open the way to more compact or higher fusion power reactors.

As part of the new initiative, scientists will study how well the magnetic field can confine the plasma in CCFE's new MAST Upgrade spherical tokamak. They will also seek to shed further light on the properties of an insulating region that exists at the edge of most tokamak plasmas, including JET, called the pedestal region. This narrow region suppresses the loss of heat and fuel from the plasma, helping to raise the core pressure closer to fusion conditions. The more insulating the pedestal, the higher the central plasma pressure.

Read the full article on the CCFE website here.

--The MAST Upgrade control room (SMD Photography)

At the core of ITER's neutral beam heating system is a novel high-frequency ion source that has been under development for years at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Garching, Germany. In recent results that are significant for ITER, IPP's ELISE test rig has achieved the ion current required by ITER in hydrogen for 1,000 seconds.

Neutral beam injection relies on high-speed, high energy atoms that penetrate deep into the plasma and transfer their energy to plasma particles by means of collision. The large plasma volume at ITER will impose new requirements on this proven method of injection: the particles will have to move three to four times faster than in previous systems in order to penetrate far enough into the plasma, and at these higher rates the positively-charged ions become difficult to neutralize.

At ITER, for the first time, a negatively-charged ion source has been selected, based on the development of several generations of prototype negative ion sources at IPP.

Since 2009 IPP's ELISE test rig—half the size of what is projected for ITER—has been a valuable source of experimental data as it has advanced step by step to new orders of magnitude. In the most recent report, ELISE was able to produce a stable, homogenous negative ion beam for 1,000 seconds at ITER current strength.

In addition to further work on ELISE, IPP will be collaborating with teams at ITER's Neutral Beam Test Facility, where the full-scale ITER-scale negative ion source SPIDER was commissioned earlier this year.

Read the full report on the website of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics.

Fusion in Europe's second edition this year is filled to the brim with interesting articles. Take the report about the latest experiment at the Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research (DIFFER). Their linear plasma generator Magnum-PSI has set a new record for the longest exposure of any material to the harsh plasma conditions in a fusion device.

A high vacuum is crucial for the fusion reaction to take place —Fusion in Europe spoke to German supplier Lybold about how they deliver custom-made vacuum solutions to Europe's fusion devices, including ITER.

"Now is the best time to be at JET," says Eva Belonohy who contributes to preparations for the second deuterium-tritium campaign at JET in over 20 years, planned for 2019 and 2020. She organized a recent workshop for fusion scientists, to share JET's latest features such as its enhanced heating powers and diagnostics or its ITER-like wall made of beryllium and tungsten.

The latest edition of Fusion in Europe also includes a report from the recent inauguration of SPIDER, the largest ion beam source in the word, in Padova, Italy; introduces award-winning young fusion expert Wei Zhang; and shows an example of how the enthusiasm for fusion can be passed on from one generation to the next within one family.

To read the current edition of Fusion in Europe click here.

Summit, the world's fastest supercomputer recently launched at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the US, will be instrumental in accelerating fusion research.

The new supercomputer takes computing powers to new heights. Summit can perform 200 petaflops per second: that is 200 quadrillion calculations, eight times more than the previous record-holder at ORNL, Titan. The massive machine—weighing more than a commercial aircraft—is also the world's largest computer equipped with artificial intelligence ... a machine whose software will write new software.

Harnessing Summit's capabilities in machine learning and simulation as well as in artificial intelligence and deep learning will allow researchers to accelerate scientific discovery in many fields, including fusion. 

For more information on Summit read the ORNL news release here and the NVIDIA blog post here.

What do Anna, Margaret, Aneeqa, Natalia, Sarah, Kat and Karina have in common?

All these women are engineers who are contributing to ITER by working on exciting issues such as building the ion cyclotron antenna, designing and manufacturing the divertor, reducing the risk of beryllium exposure to future workers, or modelling material migration.

For the first time this year, the ITER community joined in to mark the International Women in Engineering Day on 23 June. You can find out more about ITER's women engineers in the Twitter feed of the ITER Women's Network.

The day was launched as a national day by the Women's Engineering Society in the United Kingdom in 2014 to celebrate its 95th anniversary. Due to a high level of  response, interest and enthusiasm, the event turned international in 2017 and received UNESCO patronage in 2016 and again in 2018.

The International Women in Engineering Day is now an international awareness campaign to raise the profile of women in engineering and related sciences. By celebrating the achievements of women in this field, the annual event seeks to inspire young women to consider a career in engineering.

Find out more here.

--Anneqa Khan is a mechanical engineer in ITER's Science Division, working on modelling material migration and fuel retention.

India plans to reboot its steady state superconducting tokamak, SST-1, on time to be showcased at the upcoming IAEA Fusion Energy Conference, reports the media platform The Better India.

Commissioned at the Institute for Plasma Research in 2013, the SST-1 experiment has produced plasma discharges up to ~ 500 ms. Experiments were halted after some small damage was detected in the tokamak's toroidal magnet system in December 2017.

Organized from 22 to 27 October 2018 by the Government of India in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the 27th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference will be one of the year's highlights for the world fusion community, providing a platform for discussions around key physics and technology issues in fusion research.

Read about SST-1 on the website of "The Better India."

Find more about the 27th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (or pre-register online) here.