Of Interest archive

In a report published this month, the European Domestic Agency for ITER, Fusion for Energy, explains how progress was maintained on the fabrication of five ITER vacuum vessel sectors despite some factory shutdowns due to Covid-19.

"We had to analyze the impact of the pandemic on our production plants, figure out which tasks could be performed in line with the instructions issued by the Italian authorities, and adopt measures of health and safety in line with this new reality. Therefore, we re-arranged the planning of activities, prioritised some critical ones. We put forward a short-term plan to keep up the progress, while ensuring full compliance with protocols," explains Max Febvre, Fusion for Energy Manufacturing Project Manager for the vacuum vessel. As a result, the impact of the pandemic was not as disruptive as expected. 

See a full report plus recent photos here.

Secondary school teachers across Europe are invited to participate virtually in the 2020 European Fusion Teacher Day, hosted by FuseNet, the European Fusion Education Network.

Registration for the event on 2 October is free of charge and open now.

The European Fusion Teacher Day will premiere new education materials for the classroom, offer a behind-the-scenes look at international fusion experiments such as ITER, JET and GOLEM, and host a live connection with teachers throughout Europe. At the end of the event you will be able to tell your students all about nuclear fusion: from the cutting-edge research that is going on, to how to make fusion a career!

For the first part of the event, participants will join video calls in the language of their choice, hosted by fusion institutes in Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. An introductory lecture followed by a presentation of newly developed classroom materials will be the highlights of this part of the program.

Then, all participants will tune into a livestream (in English) with fusion students and scientists located on site at three tokamak facilities: ITER, JET and GOLEM.

For more information on how to participate, see FuseNet.

Looking for a new way to explain fusion in your classrooms and boardrooms? Interested in a two-minute summary of what fusion is and how it can change our future?

A new animation from Fusion for Energy, the European Domestic Agency for ITER, uses a fresh visual approach to make fusion accessible to all. Subtitles are available in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

See the video here.

Synthetic diamond windows will play a double function in the ITER machine—allowing the microwaves of the electron cyclotron heating system to pass through to reach the plasma while providing an effective leak-proof vacuum barrier.

High-purity CVD (chemical vapour deposition) diamond windows offer unsurpassed hardness, broad band optical transparency, and extremely high thermal conductivity.

The European Domestic Agency, Fusion for Energy, is working with the German firm Diamond Materials for the production of 60 diamond disks (Ø 7 cm) for the electron cyclotron heating system.

See the full story here.

A wealth of information about the behaviour and stability of the ITER plasma will be communicated by the return signals of the low-field side reflectometer (LFSR)—a diagnostic that shoots a frequency-modulated (FM) millimetre wave signal (a type of microwave) into the plasma and gathers information about the plasma edge in return.

The LFSR is the first device of its kind to measure the plasma density, and process and report the data to the central tokamak control system in real-time. This allows it to serve as an alert system, as abrupt changes in the steepness of the edge density profile, or gradient, can lead to instabilities known as edge localized modes (ELMs), which release large amounts of energy.

A final design review is planned this summer by the US ITER diagnostics team, which is based out of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The device will be installed on ITER before its First Plasma.

See the original news on the US ITER website or this report from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

The 28th edition of the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (FEC 2020) has been postponed.

Originally scheduled to take place from 12 to 17 October 2020 in Nice, France, the conference organizers have announced new dates: 10 to 15 May 2021. The venue for the event has not changed.

The IAEA Fusion Energy Conference is the world's largest conference on fusion energy. Sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and organized regularly since 1961, it attracted over 1,000 fusion scientists and engineers at its last edition, in 2018. 

The 28th edition of the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (FEC 2020) will be hosted jointly by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the ITER Organization.

For information and important dates, visit FEC2020 or the dedicated page on the IAEA website.

The sunrise of fusion startups has also reached Japan. A team from Kyoto University founded its fusion startup in October 2019. Kyoto Fusioneering Co. Ltd. assists private fusion developers through engineering solutions and business-to-business technical assistance to accelerate the practical realization of fusion energy.

Today, there are already many fusion startups around the world, mainly in North America and Europe. Fusion is no longer public-sector-only science; it is a business bringing excitement to the private sector as well. Taka Nagao, CEO of Kyoto Fusioneering, sees a real opportunity. "Even though 'fusion electricity' is quite far away, we're already in the phase of business opportunities." Fusion startups have been raising funds from venture capital funds to develop demo fusion reactors. Some of them look for cooperation with other startups to help their demo development, rather than doing everything by themselves. "So we see the manufacturing of fusion machine components as an already existing need, and it is becoming a fruitful market," he says.

His company focuses especially on critical in-vessel components that will be an important part of every fusion reactor—the blanket, which must be designed to breed tritium and efficiently remove energy for electricity generation, and the divertor, which extracts heat and ash produced by the reaction to minimize plasma contamination.

--Anri Kato

On 14 May 2020, ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot participated virtually in a Highlight Seminar organized by the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment (Princeton University, USA).

The Andlinger Center's stated goal is to translate fundamental knowledge into practical solutions that enable sustainable energy solutions and the protection of the environment. 

In the seminar attended (virtually) by over 500 people, Bernard Bigot reviewed ITER status and fielded questions on upcoming milestones, the short- and longer-term perspectives of fusion energy, and how to get involved.

Listen to the one-hour program on the Princeton University website here.

The Chinese television network CGTN has released an episode of its series "Decoding the Future" on hydrogen fusion. What is fusion? How does a tokamak work? What role for ITER? How are researchers in China contributing? Among the (virtual) panelists during the 30-minute episode in English is theortical physicist Alain Bécoulet, head of the ITER Engineering Domain.

Watch the episode on YouTube here.

COMPASS, a small tokamak located at the Institute of Plasma Physics (Czech Academy of Sciences) in Prague, will soon become COMPASS-U—a high magnetic field device with an enlarged operational space and improved performance—to serve the research programs supporting ITER and the next-phase device DEMO.

A preliminary design review of the new COMPASS-U tokamak was held remotely from 31 March to 3 April with over 60 international and domestic scientists in attendance.

See the news here.

The 360° virtual tour of ITER construction has been updated with drone footage from late February 2020. Fly in, out and over the principal buildings of the ITER worksite by clicking on the teardrop-shaped markers.

Accessible from the home page of the ITER website (yellow icon) or by clicking on the link below, the 2D tour requires no special equipment to enjoy. (If you do have 3D glasses, click on the yellow goggle symbol at the top of any screen.)

Click here to enter the latest 360° ITER virtual tour.

The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator facility at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany, is preparing for higher heating power and longer plasma pulses.

After a successful campaign that ended in late 2018—during which operators were able to achieve discharge times of up to 100 seconds (2 MW of input heating power) or 30 seconds at 6 MW—the Wendelstein 7-X team is now preparing to install actively water-cooled components inside the vacuum vessel that will allow the next round of experiments to generate plasma pulses of up to 30 minutes.

The previous cladding made of carbon tiles has now been removed, and the vessel is ready for the installation of the new water-cooled protective elements. Chief among them is the new divertor, a highly technical component made of plasma-facing front tiles mounted on water-cooled back plates—assemblies made of nearly 500,000 parts, which were the object of more than 15 years of development, fabrication and testing.

Commissioning of the upgraded facility is expected to begin early next year.

Read the full article on the IPP Greifswald website.

--Cooling elements on the back side of a divertor plate. Photo: IPP, Michael Herdlein

ITER science and technology was one of the topics that more than 80 students from across southeast Asia explored at the sixth ASEAN School on Plasma and Nuclear Fusion and Sokendai Winter School in Thailand in late January.

The school—which is organized by Sokendai University, the Thailand Institute of Nuclear Technology (TINT), and Walailak University with the support the IAEA and ITER—is part of Thailand's initiative to intensify its fusion research program and aims at promoting interaction between young talent in southeast Asian countries and leading researchers from around the world.

"The ITER Director-General gives his full support to the school by sharing the latest developments on ITER as well as the background and rationale of its science and advanced technology," said Jean Jacquinot, Senior Adviser to the Director-General of the ITER Organization, and one of the lecturers at the school.

Read the full story on the IAEA website. 

In a rare moment off the playing field, 100 of France's top under 17 rugby players visited the ITER site last week, taking advantage of a selection camp organized locally to learn more about fusion and the ITER Project. 

The ITER visits team tailors its guided tours to groups of all sizes—from individuals to buses of 50 people. Since work began on the construction platform in 2007, 158,000 members of the public have passed through the gate, including 16,000 in 2019. Among the visitors last year were 7,000 French schoolchildren.

See more on ITER visits here.

When there is no off-the-shelf solution, develop your own!

This was the mind-set of the European contractor that—because no available solution was accurate enough—invented a specialized metrology tool that is capable of measuring the diameter of cylindrical components to within an accuracy of 0.004 mm.

Working closely with the European Domestic Agency Fusion for Energy, the Spanish firm Tekniker has developed a tool that will be used to inspect the diameter of the "multi-link" connectors between the ITER divertor and its plasma-facing components and assess whether they have been manufactured to within the required 20 microns of tolerance.

Read the full story here.

If your PhD was awarded after 1 January 2017—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 2020.

Since 2008, 30 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 2020. All information can be obtained here.

Led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with strong NASA participation, the Solar Orbiter mission, which lifted off from Cape Canaveral on 10 February, will provide the first views of the Sun's uncharted polar regions, giving unprecedented insight into the workings of our familiar star.

Solar Orbiter will also investigate how intense radiation and energetic particles being blasted out from the Sun and carried by the solar wind impact our home planet, to better understand and predict periods of stormy "space weather."

Find out more at ESA or NASA.

In a context of new momentum in fusion research—as the ITER Organization begins assembling its machine, a number of upgraded tokamaks return to operation, and private investors fund fusion startups—what does the near future hold for the development of fusion energy?

This was the question the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment at Princeton University asked Steve Cowley (left), director of the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University professor of astrophysical sciences, and Egemen Kolemen (right), a PPPL physicist and assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Andlinger Center, during a Highlight Seminar event in January.

You can read their replies here.

Princeton University's Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment is a multidisciplinary research and education centre, whose mission is to the develop technologies and solutions of the future.

During the next Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE April 2021), Fusion Technology Awards will be presented for the years 2020 and 2021 to individuals who have made outstanding and widely recognized contributions to research and development in the field of fusion technology, or for technical contributions that have had a major impact in fusion technology and/or leadership and service within the community.

The Awards each consist of a USD 3,000 cash prize and a plaque. Any person, regardless of nationality or Society affiliation, is eligible for the award, with the exception that no current member of the IEEE/NPSS Standing Committee on Fusion Technology may be nominated. The nomination package should be sent to the Fusion Technology Committee Awards Chair, Carl Pawley (drcpawley@ieee.org), and it should consist of a nomination letter describing the technical and/or leadership contributions on which the nomination is recommended and a resume of the candidate.

The nomination period for the 2020 Fusion Technology Award is 4 February to 10 March 2020.

For more detailed information on eligibility, basis for judging, nomination process and a list of past Award recipients, please visit the IEEE-NPSS website and go to the "Fusion Technology Awards" section.