Some 800 cubic metres of warm (14-17 °C) concrete were poured in the course of the 10-hour long operation. Concrete pouring operations resumed early on Wednesday 22 January in the southern corner of the Tokamak Pit. Two large concrete pumps, one equipped with a 58-metre extensible arm (the largest available in France), were mobilized to fill a 500 square-metre area with specially formulated concrete produced in the nearby batching plant. Operations began at 4:00 a.m. and continued for 10 hours. This was the second segment (out of 15) poured for the Tokamak Complex basemat, and one of three that will support the future ITER Diagnostics Building. Special measures were set into place to counter the early morning cold, such as producing warm concrete in the batching plant (by heating the water and gravel) and using plastic sheeting as the work progressed to avoid too rapid cooling. Hot air blowers were also activated once the pour was complete to regulate the drying process. The complete Tokamak Complex basemat (1.5-metre-thick) is scheduled to be in place in July. Work will resume next week on the rebar installation in the central area of the Tokamak Pit.

With a peak AC current at 415 kA and a peak DC current at 385 kA, the ITER power supply test facility at the Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP) set a new record on 2 December 2013, demonstrating its capability to host the demanding short circuit test for ITER power converters. The facility, under construction since 2008, consists of three test platforms that can support the AC short circuit test up to 350 kA, the DC multifunction test up to 400 kA and 2 kV and a steady state test up to 60kA/1.35 kV. The three platforms can perform all the tests required for qualifying the ITER poloidal field power converters, including rated current tests, short circuit current tests, temperature rise tests and control/protection/operation verification. In addition, they are able to provide a wide range of regulated current and voltage for the different purposes of the tests.    The test facility has already started accompanying the development of the ITER poloidal field converter prototype components. (Pictured: the DC disconnector test platform.) Moreover, the facility can host the installation of an entire poloidal field converter unit and operate it in different modes to simulate real ITER operation.  The test facility has already started accompanying the development of the ITER poloidal field converter prototype components. Several types of tests have been run, including the short-circuit (175 kA) and temperature rise (28 kA/4 hr) tests of the DC reactor; the short circuit withstand (350 kA/100 ms) and thermal stability (140 kA/2 s) tests of the enclosed AC busbar; and the short circuit withstand (350 kA/100 ms) and temperature rise (55 kA) tests of the DC disconnector. The short circuit withstand (350 kA) and the current balance tests of the converter bridge and external bypass will be performed soon.

An important aspect of ITER's scientific program revolves around the development of collaborative and training activities with academic and research organizations in the Members. A significant expansion of these activities occurred on Christmas Eve when ITER Director-General Osamu Motojima signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Tohoku University on Scientific, Academic and Educational Cooperation, the first such agreement established with a Japanese university.   Tohoku University, founded in 1907 and based in Sendai in northern Honshu, is one of Japan's leading universities, with approximately 6,000 staff and 18,000 students.   At the signing ceremony for the Memorandum of Understanding, held in Tokyo on the afternoon of 24 December, DG Motojima was joined by Prof Susumu Satomi, President of Tohoku University and Mr Kanji Fujiki, Deputy Minister of MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) in expressing the need to expand ties between the ITER Project and academic institutions, with their deep expertise in many areas of science and technology of importance to the success of ITER. The agreement will promote opportunities for collaboration between the university's researchers and ITER scientists and engineers, and will also open the possibility of Tohoku students carrying out research projects at the ITER Organization as part of their training.   At the celebration which followed the signing ceremony and a series of presentations on the ITER Project's construction, technology and science activities, several members of ITER staff had the opportunity to meet senior academics from Tohoku and discuss possibilities for future collaboration.

With the progression of ITER conductor production all over the world, the first lengths of completed conductors are being delivered to coil manufacturers. Although the lengths may extend up to nearly one kilometre, in most cases it will be necessary to connect several lengths together in order to wind the final coils.   To connect adjacent conductor lengths electrically and to connect the coil terminals to the feeder busbars, manufacturers will have to fabricate joints . While standard brazing is generally used in industry to connect regular copper conductor lengths, it has proven far more challenging to join superconducting conductor lengths. Many years of development in laboratories and industry have proved necessary to arrive at acceptable solutions.   Coaxial joint design. Laced superconducting shells, overlapping both cable ends, are enclosed inside two copper crescents. A stainless steel jacket is installed around. One of the challenges presented by superconductors is keeping the joint resistance low enough to prevent excessive Joule heating and provide a current transfer, from one conductor to the next, with an as-even-as-possible current distribution among cable strands and within limited space. Another challenge is the cable-in-conduit design (stainless steel jacket around the conductor and an internal flow of supercritical helium) that is common to all ITER conductors. The jacket has to be removed to connect adjacent superconducting cables, while all the while respecting the continuity of the helium flow and tightness of the conduit.   In order to perform final qualification of the joints for ITER conductors, it has been decided to manufacture samples and to measure performance—in particular, joint resistance—in conditions as relevant as possible to tokamak operation. The tests will be performed at the SULTAN facility in Switzerland.   N. Martovetsky, from US ITER, presents the design of the central solenoid joint sample to the review panel chaired by P. Bruzzone (foreground, left) on 18 December 2013. The design of the joints connecting the ITER correction coils with the feeder busbars relies on the use of the overlap twin-box joint concept (see Fig. 1), initially developed in the laboratories of the French CEA and then used in the Toroidal Field Model Coil (TFMC) built by Europe during the ITER Engineering Design Activities phase. In this design, each conductor end is enclosed inside a bimetallic stainless steel-copper box and adjacent box copper faces are soldered with each other. Low resistance can be achieved, in the order of a few nanoohms, but at the expense of a large consumption of space since locally two conductors are overlapping.     Due to the specific space requirements of the central solenoid, the US Domestic Agency has developed two new types of joints, both fitting within the regular space of a single conductor: a splice joint (Fig. 4), connecting conductor lengths inside a module; and a coaxial joint (Fig. 2), connecting coil terminals to busbar extensions running along the coil outer diameter. The busbar extensions are themselves connected to the feeder busbars by classical twin-box joints.   Splice joint connecting conductor lengths inside central solenoid modules. After the jacket is removed at both cable ends, the cables are interleaved at the level of each sub-cable and jacket shells are installed around and welded to the conductor jacket. Two final design reviews were conducted in late 2013 to review the designs of a correction coil joint sample (to be manufactured by correction coil manufacturer ASIPP, China), and the design of a central solenoid joint sample (to be manufactured by central solenoid modules manufacturer General Atomics, US). Both samples are planned to be manufactured and tested in 2014.   For both the correction coil and central solenoid joint designs, the review panel provided a positive recommendation on the presented designs and on the proposed testing programs, paving the way to the start of their manufacture early 2014.

The Centre de Recherches en Physique des Plasmas (CRPP) in Switzerland has studied fundamental plasma physics since 1961, with a particular focus on magnetic fusion since 1979. Part of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the CRPP operates the TCV tokamak and the SULTAN facility for testing and evaluating high current superconductors. We recently spoke with Pierluigi Bruzzone, head of CRPP's Superconductivity section, about work currently underway at SULTAN for the ITER magnets.     

​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.

​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. Read more on PhysOrg website.

​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. Read more on Space Daily website.

​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.    

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.  

​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.

​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)

​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.