What’s New

23 June 2014

ITER news digest for the period of 16 June 2014 to 23 June 2014.

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Featured (4)

Of interest (4)

Press (5)

Featured

Council assesses progress and challenges as ITER moves forward

Prestigious superconductor award for ITER's Arnaud Devred

How to make a radial plate in 150 days

Chinese team completes prototype for ITER's feeder system

Europe's E-ELT blast marks first step in new science mega-project

Construction of the European Extremely Large Telescope has officially begun in the Atacama desert in Chile, marking the first step in a true mega-project that could offer us answers to some of the most profound questions in science.

The event this week, the blasting of the top of Cerro Armazones — 3,000 metres high until Thursday, a few less now — was far less dramatic than many of the onlookers at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal facility 25 kilometres away had hoped for, but it was a significant first step in taking the E-ELT from the drawing board to reality.

The function of the blast was to loosen many thousands of tons of rock from the summit in order for the earth movers to begin clearing a flat, circular area for the foundations of the telescope. This really is just the first small step in a massively ambitious project to build the E-ELT that will take at least a decade to finish.

The science case for the E-ELT is quite easy to make, even to non-astronomers. While some of the great telescopes now in space and on the ground are designed to observe technical subjects such as the geometry of galaxies or the formation of stars, the E-ELT pitches itself as the telescope that will allow us to directly look at other planets around other stars.

The E-ELT science team reckon they have a good chance of being the first to directly observe little blue dots like Earth, if they exist.

Soccer and JET: conflicting demands...

The World Cup is an opportunity to take a look at how popular football games affect JET's experimental schedule: JET's peak power demand is over one percent of the UK supply — albeit for very short periods — so the supply from the grid is limited to 575 megawatts, and JET's two flywheels are used to top up if necessary. But at some times, JET is not allowed to take any power from the grid at all.

This happens when there are other major energy consuming events — such as halftime in a major football final, or in the ad-breaks in a popular TV show — times at which millions of people will switch on the kettle or go to the toilet, which creates an electrical load on the water pumping system. In fact JET power supply engineers are in regular contact with the grid, who advise every day the times at which pulses should be avoided — for example the fifteen to twenty minutes around sunset when lots of people turn on their lights.

The engineers also monitor the frequency of the electricity supplied by the grid throughout the day: if the frequency falls much below the regulation 50 Hz they know the grid is under load and so they will recommend to the Engineer In Charge that pulses not be run.

Read more on EFDA website.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=323

Nine years into one: the time-lapse video of Wendelstein 7-X assembly

In this three-minute time-lapse video, nine years of Wendelstein 7-X assembly (2005 to 2014) are condensed into three-minutes. The fusion device at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, in Germany, comprises five large and almost identical modules that were pre-installed and then assembled in a circle in the experimentation hall. Pump-down of the machine began in May.

Read more about Wendelstein 7-X on the IPP website.

Permalink : https://www.iter.org/of-interest?id=321

Important progress for JT-60SA

See the progress of the JT-60SA project — one of the three projects being developed under the Broader Approach Agreement — in this new clip filmed on-site in Naka, Japan. The clip shows that the six year assembly of JT-60SA is moving forward: the heart of the machine, the vacuum vessel, is now being built.

Implemented by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) and the European Domestic Agency for ITER, F4E, the advanced superconducting JT-60SA (super advanced) tokamak will be used to quickly identify how to optimize plasma performance for ITER and will study advanced modes of plasma operation suitable for DEMO. A first plasma is foreseen for March 2019.

You can watch the video here or read the news released on F4E's Media Corner.