FUSION Q ua r t e r ly n e w s & v i e w s o n t h e p r o g r e s s i n f u s i o n r e s e a r c h
ITER RELIES ON JET ITER DIREc ToR GEnER al vIsITs EFDa-JET LOOKING AHEAD 100 YEARS WITH EFDA TIMES HOW INDUSTRY BENEFITS FROM FUSION RESEARCH JET INSPIRES YOUNG TALENT
3 | 2012
EUROPEAN FUSION DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENT
FUSION in europe | Contents | FUSION in europe № 3 | 2012
contents Moving Forward
12
US participates in Wendelstein 7-X
3
EFDA iter relies on Jet
5
Designing a straight path to fusion energy
6
looking ahead 100 years with efDa tiMes
8
Associates efficient high-power plasma heating
9
how industry benefits from fusion research
(Image: IPP, Anja Richter-Ullmann)
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10
recovering tritium from Jet’s waste
12
us participates in wendelstein 7-X
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snowflakes spread the heat
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fusion in europe invites: hans-Dieter harig
JETInsight
JET experiments take a break
15
the Joint european torus
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Jet experiments take a break
18
encouraging work for iter
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Jet guestbook
Community 20
In dialogue Jet inspires young talent
Miscellaneous
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22
newsflash, efDa online
JET inspires young talent Title pictures: EFDA, CCFE
imprint
efDa close support unit – garching Boltzmannstr. 2 85748 garching / Munich
FUSION in europe issn 1818-5355
germany phone: +49-89-3299-4263 fax:
+49-89-3299-4197
e-mail: christine.rueth@efda.org for more information see the website:
editors: petra nieckchen, christine rüth
www.efda.org
subscribe at newsletter@efda.org
2
© francesco romanelli (efDa leader) 2012. this newsletter or parts of it may not be reproduced without permission. text, pictures and layout, except where noted, courtesy of the efDa parties. the efDa parties are the european commission and the associates of the european fusion programme which is co-ordinated and managed by the commission. neither the commission, the associates nor anyone acting on their behalf is responsible for any damage resulting from the use of information contained in this publication.
| Moving Forward | EFDA |
ITER relies on JET
From left: David campbell, alberto loarte, Francesco Romanelli, Tim Jones (ccFE), osamu Motojima and lorne Horton (Picture: EFDA)
o
n July 11, iter Director general
osamu Motojima came to Jet to
lay the foundation for the intensified collaboration between the two experiments. Motojima-san met with efDa leader francesco romanelli to review the recent experiments with the iter-like-wall and to discuss future collaborative work on Jet.
“We strongly welcome ITER’s interest in JET” said Romanelli. “In the view of generating results that support ITER, it is our aim to make JET available also for scientists beyond Europe.” With Motojima were David Campbell (ITER Director of Plasma Operation) and Alberto Loarte (ITER senior scientist). “We are keen to work closely with the JET team on matters like disruptions or melting studies,“ said David Campbell, who spoke to staff at JET about the science challenges for ITER. “The work carried out here is extremely impressive and will be important for the exploitation of ITER. I encourage you to carry on along the same path.” Back in the 90s, results from JET experiments provided the basis for the design of ITER. Now that ITER is being built, the JET experiments aid the process of designing the ITER physics programme and preparing ITER operation. JET’s size, its capability to operate with tritium and its recently installed ITER-Like-Wall, make it the best machine to answer ITER questions. “ITER depends on the success of JET” Director General Motojima said. “The results that have been achieved with the new wall in such a short time are both impressive and encouraging”.
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FUSION IN EUROPE | Moving Forward | EFDA |
Taking collaboration to a new level. ITER and JET maintain close ties: For years, ITER representatives have attended the JET planning meetings and the JET Associates have aligned their experimental programme to meet the needs of ITER. Now that JET experiments are increasingly dedicated towards providing answers for creating ITER, ITER scientists should play an active role in them. To provide a legal framework for this participation, the ITER Organization will join the IEA Implementing Agreement for Cooperation on Tokamak Programmes. These types of contract form the basis for international collaboration on JET and regulate issues such as the exchange of personnel, access to data, publication rules and intellectual property rights. “This is a very important step,” explained EFDA Senior Advisor Duarte Borba. “To make sure that our experiments provide the right results to ITER, we need to involve ITER scientists early on. We want them to participate in the definition and execution of the experiments as well as in the analysis of the results.”
Investigating ITER cost cuts. One key experiment planned for next year is to investigate how deliberately melted tungsten tiles affect JET operation. The outcome of this exercise could help ITER save 400 million euros. According to current plans, ITER will start operation with a carbon divertor and change over to tungsten for the deuterium-tritium experiments. The reason for this is the assumption that carbon will be more forgiving during the start-up phase. To cut ITER costs, the Director General proposed starting with tungsten immediately. The ITER council has now granted time to work on the technology and assess the risks that accidental melting of tungsten tiles may pose for ITER operation. The melting experiments JET is to carry out will provide key answers to that question.
Saving time for ITER. JET is also the only facility capable of running deuterium-tritium (D-T) experiments. This allows the investigation of specific physics related to D-T regimes of operation, such as how mitigation
4
techniques work for harmful ELM-instabilities, a process which will shorten the learning curve at ITER. Having ITER scientists on-site at JET will save time, too, said Lorne Horton, who heads the EFDA JET Department. “An extended D-T campaign at JET is an ideal training ground for ITER personnel. ITER has an aggressive schedule and the scientific teams do not have much time to get used to each other or to the procedures of a nuclear fusion facility.” In his opinion, it would certainly be a head start if part of the team have already worked together. “The independent panel that reviewed JET and the European Fusion programme pointed this out.” Horton continued, “We hope that ITER will recognise that and send us staff and we recommend other ITER partners to do the same.” JET would also be in a position to test hardware for ITER, added Duarte Borba. “In the past, we have always tested new methods on smaller tokamaks, like ASDEX Upgrade or D-III D, and then scaled them up to JET. It makes a lot of sense to do the same for ITER, for instance with the planned mitigation systems for ELM instabilities. Knowing how the systems behave before installing them in ITER saves a lot of time.”
Involving ITER partners. JET also promotes the participation of other ITER partners in its programme, Borba continues. “Scientists from the ITER Organization will now be directly involved in JET experiments, but ITER is a group of partners. To make ITER a success, we need to provide these countries with the opportunity to conduct experiments at JET.” One method of doing this may be to implement a system that they have developed for ITER and to carry out preparatory experiments on JET. JET is, for instance, currently engaged in collaboration with India regarding software for charge exchange diagnostic systems. Every collaboration with an ITER partner brings more experts and knowledge to the JET team, also benefiting the European fusion programme. With sufficient collaboration of this type, JET's role as a hub for fusion knowledge will reach beyond Europe and encompass the whole world. ■
| Moving Forward | EFDA |
DESIgnIng A STRAIghT pATh To FuSIon EnERgy Fusion Roadmap meeting, July 25 – 26
H
ow can Europe implement fusion energy in the most efficient way? Approximately 100 European fusion researchers – among them the Heads of about 30 Research Units – met in Garching to discuss this question. The European Commission has asked the fusion community to deliver a Fusion Roadmap in the form of a realistic step-by-step plan which will enable the supply of fusion electricity by 2050. EFDA was assigned the task of designing the roadmap and proposed a goal-oriented programme that takes the outcomes of the recent reviews of the European fusion programme into account. After presenting the proposal separately to the Associates, the fusion community was invited to Garching to ensure that all views on the matter have been taken into account. Ultimately, the Roadmap needs to break the process of attaining fusion power down into specific projects and propose the amount of resources for Europe’s upcoming framework programme, Horizon 2020. EFDA intends to reach a final consensus on the Roadmap at the Steering Committee meeting which will take place in October. ■
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FUSION in europe | Moving Forward | EFDA |
LOOKING AHEAD 100 YEARS WITH EFDA TIMES What if… the world’s societies put economic growth over climate concerns?
t
hese are some of the answers the
energy system model efDa tiMes
provides when asked how the world’s
What if… the world agrees on
energy supply evolves until 2100.
emissions?
cause none of the existing models
an upper limit for carbon dioxide
efDa has developed this model betook fusion energy into account. if fusion succeeds, it will start to have an impact in the second half of this century. therefore efDa tiMes considers the time period from 2000 until 2100, looking much further ahead than usual models. the international energy agency (iea) world energy outlook, for instance, only goes as far as 2035. By extending the model to 2100,
80 percent of the global primary
energy will be drawn from fossil fuels – mostly from cheap coal.
Renewable, fission and fusion en-
ergy will supply half of the global primary energy demand.
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efDa tiMes also covers the era of increasingly expensive gas, oil and uranium supplies.
| Moving Forward | EFDA | 63
2010 160
2060 290
2100
Global electricity production (in exajoule per year). Until 2100, the production could rise by more than a factor of four. The world population would then exceed 10 Billion people and the global economy would have grown sevenfold (Data base: moderate Un population scenario; GEM-E3 model for growth).
how EFDA TIMES works EFDA Times is a global energy system model. It describes the entire process chain from the primary energy source up to different means of energy usage for 15 regions of the world. For a set of defined threshold conditions, for example, different measures to reduce CO2-emissions or societal preferences for non-nuclear energy, EFDA TIMES produces the energy mix with the lowest cost for investment, operation, maintenance and dismantling. The model does not calculate in the sense of extrapolating past energy scenarios, but it “acts” with a defined set of rules and under the various boundary conditions. According to the technology available at a given year, the model “invests” in new power plants to accommodate population growth and economic development and to replace “old” plants, which are phased out after a specified technical lifetime. The overall cost of an energy mix is determined by data about energy production costs and efficiency for the various technologies. EFDA TIMES applies an energy model generator as developed under IEA. The future development assumptions are driven by UN-scenarios for population growth and by the European Commission’s GEM-E3 model for economic development. EFDA TIMES incorporates today’s knowledge about future energy technologies like carbon capture storage or generation 4 nuclear fission plants. The parameters for fusion energy are based on the
European Power Plant Conceptual Study from 2005. The EFDA TIMES model is validated by ensuring that its results until 2035 match the IEA scenarios.
Decision making with EFDA TIMES EFDA TIMES provides the means with which to explore the potential of fusion energy for different regions and under different societal circumstances. It enables the fusion community to participate in energy debates and it offers stakeholders who deal with energy investments, a tool to assess the consequences of different decisions. The model answers questions like: under what circumstances will fusion power succeed in a future energy market? What other energy technologies will fusion have to compete with? How will fusion fare under different climate protection decisions? What are the consequences if fusion is not available? What will happen if some regions also ban nuclear fission? EFDA TIMES can also be used to explore how the properties of the various fusion power plant designs will affect their respective success in a future energy market. ■ This article uses input from recent IPP-exhibits on energy scenarios. Contact: Tobias Eder, IPP, Tobias.Eder@ipp.mpg.de All figures based on data provided by Tobias Eder.
Fusion: ∼ 4 % Fusion: ∼ 36 %
Fusion: ∼ 36 % Renewable Energies: ∼ 44 %
No climate saving measures
Global warming limited to 3º C (atmospheric CO₂-concentrations below 550 ppm)
Electricity production in 2100: If global warming is to be avoided, societies will invest in innovative technologies like renewable energies and fusion.
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FUSION in europe | Moving Forward | Associates |
efficient high-power p l a s M a h e at i n g CCFE tests neutral beam injector based on negative ions ions is then directed through a set of accelerating grids to speed the particles up. Instead of being neutralised and directed into a tokamak, the ion beam hits a copper target plate containing diagnostic sensors which allow physicists at SNIF to analyse the shape and profile of the beam. These results can then be scaled up to predict performance in the large high-power tokamaks of the future.
snIF Plasma (Image CCFE)
F
iring beams of high-speed neutral atoms into the plasma is one of the main heating methods used in tokamaks. Just like billiard balls, the atoms of the beam transfer their energy to the slower plasma ions during the process of collision. Traditionally, fusion machines use neutral beam systems with positive ions that are accelerated and neutralised before they enter the plasma. However, a lot of energy is lost during the neutralisation process. This loss increases rapidly with the rising beam energy. A power plant requires a one megaelectronvolt beam to operate, and for this the neutralisation efficiency would be as low as 2 %. It seems nearly impossible to attach an electron to a beam particle that is moving at some ten thousand kilometres per second. Causing the particle to lose electrons is much easier – the neutralisation efficiency for a negative ion beam is 58 % at the same energy level. ITER and the demonstration power plant DEMO will therefore use negative ion neutral beam systems. Europe is in charge of providing the ITER system and a test bed is under construction at Consorzio RFX, Italy. CCFE’s Small Negative Ion Facility (SNIF) started operation in June and its main role is to look for ways of improving techniques for negative ion beam systems beyond ITER. Despite being a small-scale test bed, SNIF is able to emulate the negative ion beam production process used in tokamaks. A relatively cold plasma (10,000 °C) is formed to produce negative hydrogen ions; a beam of
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Materials for ion sources. One of the key areas SNIF will investigate is materials for ion sources on postITER machines. A coating on the walls of the source material reacts with the incoming ions and atoms, giving up electrons to produce negative ions to flow into the heating beam. ITER will use caesium as an ion source material, but for fusion power plants, other candidates are also being considered. These should be capable of producing beams without the problems that are posed by the highly reactive caesium. SNIF will test alternative materials, such as boron-doped diamond samples. Built at a low cost, and primarily using spare parts from previous systems, SNIF can also be switched over to act as a positive ion system, giving it sufficient flexibility to research other areas of neutral beam development and materials testing. Jamie Zacks, a Lead Physicist at SNIF, said: “For the first time in fifteen years, CCFE now has its own negative ion test bed, instead of borrowing facilities from other fusion labs. This, combined with its size, gives us much more control and flexibility over experiments and allows us to open up new collaborations with partners. So far SNIF is performing very well but there is much development still to do.” Elizabeth Surrey, CCFE's Technology Programme Leader, added: “SNIF is going to make major contributions to European power plant studies under EFDA but also to CCFE's own technology projects. Its flexibility will complement the larger negative ion facilities at IPP and RFX that are developing the ITER neutral beam technology and will enable us to progress towards DEMO faster.“ ■ Nick Holloway, CCFE Contact: Dr Elizabeth Surrey, CCFE, Elizabeth.Surrey@ccfe.ac.uk
| Moving Forward | Associates |
ho w I N d U S T Ry b E N E F I TS fr oM F U S I O N R E S E a RC h
M
AN Diesel Turbo, Germany, introduced the latest threedimensional modelling techniques and employed the newest high-tech welding technologies in order to manufacture the strangely shaped vessel of Wendelstein 7-X. The company now uses this expertise and these technologies for the serial production of chemical reactors and has thus gained significant competitive advantages. This is just one of many examples named in a new brochure published by IPP which details how various companies benefit from fusion research projects. In total, the brochure lists 15 companies along with their contribution to Wendelstein 7-X and other fusion devices and how this involvement has helped them gain other contracts, open up new markets or access Europe’s largest fusion research project ITER. Manufacturing the complexly shaped superconducting magnets for Wendelstein 7-X, for instance, has helped Babcock Noell GmbH win a contract for 113 superconducting magnets for the German Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research FAIR. Thales Electron and partners, to name one last example, have developed the powerful microwave system for the experiments. High-power microwave tubes are an important technology for communication and materials processing, as well as for the upcoming fusion experiments ITER and DEMO. Thanks to their work for Wendelstein 7-X, these companies are now much better positioned within these markets. ■Download the brochure at: http://tinyurl.com/industrybrochure
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FUSION IN EUROPE | Moving Forward | Associates |
R E CO V E R I N G T R I T I U M F R O M J E T ’ S WA S T E
Image: Thinkstock
E
NEA and CEA have developed a membrane process and a palladium-based reactor to extract tritium from JET’s housekeeping waste. Compared to alternative systems, the mem-
branes in the new device suffer less mechanical stress and the overall process is more energy efficient. Both Associates have jointly filed patents for their inventions, as the technology may also be employed in other nuclear facilities or used to produce pure hydrogen for clean energy applications such as polymeric fuel cells. The work was carried out within the JET Fusion Technology Task Force.
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| Moving Forward | Associates | Housekeeping waste comprises gloves, masks, personal gas filters or over clothes that have been used inside JET’s reactor chamber. A nuclear facility produces around 0.2 kg housekeeping waste per hour and worker. Reducing the tritium content of this waste is important, because the disposal costs depend on the level of contamination and valuable tritium can be reused. The usual detritiation techniques, however, produce tritiated water, which must undergo a second process to recover the tritium. ENEA and CEA have adapted the concept of palladium silver alloy membrane reactors – a technique which is also used to detritiate JET exhaust gas. These membranes are permeable for hydrogen isotopes, but not
tions that were evident in previous versions. Firstly, during operation, the long and thin-walled membrane tube elongates up to about two percent because it takes up hydrogen. If it is mounted in a fixed manner, it compresses cyclically. The mechanical stress may cause defects in the crystal structure of the membrane, and thus cause it to lose its property of being selectively permeable for hydrogen isotopes only. The tube fixtures in the new reactor eliminate any harmful compressive mechanical stress. Secondly, the tritium exchange reaction is most efficient at temperatures between 300 and 400 °C. The new reactor heats only the membranes via an electric current running through the tube (direct ohmic heating). It requires approximately half the heating power of traditional systems which heat the gas and the reactor shell as well. This high level of usion power burns the nuclei of hydrogen iso efficiency makes the reactopes tritium and deuterium. tritium is a radiotor more attractive for producing pure hydrogen active element and contaminates the reactor in clean energy applications. chamber. it also is practically non-existent in a natural
f
state and is therefore very expensive. thus a fusion power
Tests performed at CEA show that the Pd-memplant must be able to recover and reuse all unused tribrane reactor is able to tium. while scientific fusion experiments usually use with achieve a tritium decontamination factor of 10 for deuterium plasmas, Jet is the only currently operating the gas. This thus demondevice that has used tritium in the past and which has strates that the method can be applied to the another deuterium-tritium experimental campaign treatment of housekeeping waste. The capacity of planned for 2015. this laboratory device is sufficient to detritiate incoming waste from JET. for molecules and thus enable the separation of tritium. However, if all of JET’s housekeeping waste inventory The waste is ground up and heated to about 120 °C and was to be treated, this prototype would need to be scaled a carrier gas stream takes up the tritium in form of triup to a multi-tube version. ■ tiated water vapour. Inside the membrane reactor, the tritiated gas flows through a 50 cm long membrane tube with a diameter of 10 mm and a wall thickness of 0.150 Contact: mm. Outside the tube, pure hydrogen gas flows in the Dr Silvano Tosti, ENEA, silvano.tosti@enea.it; opposite direction. These hydrogen atoms enter the tube Pierre Trabuc, CEA, pierre.trabuc@cea.fr and replace the tritium atoms in the waste gas. A catalyst in the tube promotes this isotopic exchange reaction. References: The tritium atoms exit the tube through the membrane X. Lefebvre, et al., Preliminary results from a detritiation and leave the reactor with the outside gas stream. facility dedicated to soft housekeeping waste, Fusion CEA developed the detritiation process and ENEA built the reactor. Its design overcomes major two complica-
Eng. Des. (2012) S.Tosti,et al., Design of Pd-based membrane reactor for gas detritiation, Fusion Eng. Des.(2011)
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FUSION in europe | Moving Forward | Associates |
us participates in wenDelstein 7-X
i
n July, ipp greifswald received the first of five auxiliary coils that princeton plasma physics laboratory (pppl) have had manufactured for wendelstein 7-X. “i am very relieved that the coil has survived the 7,000 kilometre journey from pennsylvania without damage”, said Konrad riße, who is responsible for the auxiliary coils in the wendelstein 7-X project. from september onwards, one coil after the other, each weighing more than a ton, will be attached to the outer vessel.
The five shop window-size coils are designed to help with precise adjustment of the magnetic fields on the plasma edge. They ensure that the outer contour of the plasma maintains exactly the shape required for subsequent experiments. The basic data for the components came from the IPP; engineers and scientists from Princeton took over the construction and supervised industrial production. Hutch Neilson, the director of advanced projects at PPPL, pointed out: “The U.S. IPP partnership in Wendelstein 7-X is the best route to discovering how to use three-dimensional magnetic fields to maintain a high-performance plasma in a steadystate without overheating the surrounding walls.” He continued: “ In return for the contribution of scientific talent and equipment such as the trim coils, the U.S. is welcomed as a partner in the Wendelstein 7-X research, with the opportunity to advance U.S. stellarator goals using the unique, world-class Wendelstein 7-X facility."
The 4.3 million dollar investment is the largest contribution to the USA’s scientific cooperation on Wendelstein 7-X. Overall, the USA is investing more than 7.5 million dollars in its construction. In addition to the fusion laboratory at Princeton, the institutes in Oak Ridge and Los Alamos are also contributing by planning parts of the wall covering and by supplying measuring instruments for the observation of the plasma. In return, the participating U.S. institutions become partners in the Wendelstein 7-X research programme. This GermanAmerican cooperation is one of a total of nine projects under the U.S. Department of Energy’s “Innovative Approaches to Fusion” programme. ■ Isabella Milch, IPP More information: http://tinyurl.com/ipp-pppl-w7x http://tinyurl.com/pppl-w7x
The IPP coil team (Konrad Riße 2nd from left) takes delivery of the first auxiliary coil. (Photo: IPP, Anja Richter-Ullmann)
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| Moving Forward | Associates |
snowflaKes
SpREAD ThE hEAT
s
cientists from the swiss associate crpp, lawrence livermore national laboratory and princeton plasma physics laboratory received the renowned r&D 100 award 2012 for developing the snowflake power divertor. the technique could be the solution to one of the biggest obstacles on the road to fusion power.
snowflake configuration in fusion plasmas was then created at CRPP in the tokamak TCV. TCV is a worldwide unique tokamak in terms of its flexibility to shape the plasma. It is equipped with 16 independent magnetic coils and is capable of implementing innovative configurations such as the snowflake. The snowflake divertor concept has also been implemented at the Princeton Plasma Physics (PPPL) tokamak NSTX. Both experiments confirm that the technique is a valid concept enabling the reduction of the heat load at the divertor. Since 1963, the R&D 100 award has been internationally recognised as a benchmark for excellence in various areas of industry and science. An independent panel of experts, along with the US R&D magazine annually selects the 100 most significant technological advances. In the past, it has been awarded to inventions such as the halogen lamp, the fax machine, or, more recently, HD television. ■
Illustration based on Image from EPFl
Handling plasma exhausts is, today, considered to be one of the most important unsolved problems on the road to a fusion power plant. In a fusion reactor, magnetic fields keep the plasma away from the reactor wall in order to allow the high temperatures needed for fusion reactions to be achieved. The most promising magnetic field configuration so far forms two open magnetic field lines which guide the outer – cooler – plasma layer to a dedicated area, the divertor, where it is removed. Designing materials that are strong enough to withstand this heat flux is an important challenge in fusion research. The snowflake technique has the potential to reduce the heat at the divertor by 50 percent. It thus opens up a way to create heat loads that can be tolerated by existing materials. The snowflake divertor employs a more advanced magnetic field configuration which produces four 'legs' – open magnetic field lines – instead of the usual two, linking the hot plasma to the divertor. The plasma is flared at the divertor surface and the residual heat flux per wall area is reduced. The name “snowflake” stems from the six fold pattern formed by the magnetic field lines. The theory of the concept was developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the first
Contact: Dr. Yves Martin, CRPP, yves.martin@epfl.ch More information: CRPP: http://tinyurl.com/epflrd100 LLNL: http://tinyurl.com/llnlrd100 PPPL: http://tinyurl.com/ppplrd100
EFDA congratulates Dimitry Ryutov (LLNL), Vlad Soukhanovskii (LLNL, on assignement at PPPL) and F. Piras, S. Codea, B. Duval and J.-M. Moret (CRPP), Jon Menard and Egemen Kolemen (PPPL) and Joon-Wook Ahn (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, on assignment at PPPL).
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FUSION in europe | Community | People |
fusion in europe invites: haNS-dIETER haRIg WHY AN INDUSTRIALISED SOCIETY SHOULD PROMOTE FUSION RESEARCH
S
ources for thermal energy conversion have been developed for more than a century, resulting in highly efficient power plants with diminishing needs with regard to cost, material, personnel and space. Electricity has become accessible for more and more people and processes, and has brought increased wealth with it. But in the light of continuously rising energy demands and the associated increase in gas emissions, societies are compelled to look towards renewable energy sources. In industrialised nations, however, these sources alone will not be sufficient in the long run. Additional power sources will also be required. Fusing hydrogen nuclei yields an energy output that is magnitudes higher than the oxidation of hydrogen or carbon atoms that takes place when burning fossil fuels or biomass. The technological effort needed to create fusion power will be significantly higher than that for chemical heat production, but the balance when compared to other electricity production techniques promises to remain overwhelmingly positive. Even the safety measures required for fusion power plants will not question this positive balance. At no time does a fusion device contain amounts of energy that could possibly destroy the system or cause catastrophes if the plant was externally damaged. Moreover, the fusion process does not produce long-lived radioactive waste. Some people may, however, believe that the development of fusion has already taken too long and they thus doubt its success. But the scientific progress is immense and the construction of fusion experiments has resulted in numerous technological solutions and experiences, which provide a strong case in favour of continuing the research. In Germany, we are currently witnessing the construction of the world’s largest stellarator fusion experiment, Wendelstein 7-X. Companies from Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland have developed technologies and solved problems that have never arisen before. Examples include the uniquely shaped superconducting coils by Babcock Noell and Ansaldo, microwave tubes by Thales Electron Devices which supply one million watts to heat the plasma, or the wall elements from Plansee SE which are designed to withstand ten million watts of heat per square metre when Wendelstein 7-X is operating.
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DR hAnS-DIETER hARIg studied mechanical engineering in hannover and Berlin and received a doctorate at the university of grenoble. from 1995, he worked at the nuclear research centre in grenoble and was involved in the construction of the high-flux reactor at institut laue-langevin. he subsequently joined the nuclear research centre in Jülich (now forschungszentrum Jülich) as assistant to the executive board. after three years in Jülich, he started working in the electricity industry and remained in the field until his retirement in 2003. in his last position, he was chief executive officer of the german energy company e.on energie ag. hans-Dieter harig is a member of several boards of directors and advisory boards in energy, industry or science and also works as a consultant. harig is member of the advisory board of Max-plank-institut für plasmaphysik. The success and progress of German and European fusion research, along with our concern regarding the long term safety of energy supply in an industrialised society, has led us – a group of senior representatives of German industry, research and politics – to form the friends of fusion. In view of both the opportunities that lie in fusion, and the long way still to go, we aim to regularly inform the industry, the scientific community and the public about the progress and issues encountered in fusion research. We want to achieve a wider understanding of and support for German fusion research activities. Our motivation is a strong conviction that an industrialised society should promote the development of complex technologies for energy production. We know from experience that mastering such energy conversion processes will give us global competitive advantages that will be hard to catch up with. Fusion power plants will be some of the most challenging of energy production facilities. Today, power plants built in Germany are among the world’s best. But will Germany be able to maintain its leading position if its annual spending on fusion research amounts to only 0.5 % of the subsidies that flow into electricity production from renewable energies? ■
| JETInsight |
THE JOINT EUROPEAN TORUS, JET EUROPE’S LARGEST FUSION DEVICE – FUNDED AND USED IN PARTNERSHIP
The JET vessel in May 2011, featuring the complete ITER-like Wall (Picture: EFDA)
EFDA provides the work platform to exploit JET in an efficient and focused way. More than 40 European fusion laboratories collectively contribute to the JET scientific programme and develop the hardware of the machine further. The tokamak is located at the Culham Science Centre near Oxford in the UK. It is funded by EURATOM, by the European Associates, and by UK’s fusion Associate, the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) as host. CCFE operates the JET facilities including carrying out the maintenance and refurbishment work required to realise the given scientific goals.
FUSION in europe | JETInsight |
JET EXPERIMENTS ta K e a BreaK
J
uly marked the end of the ďŹ rst
period of Jet operation with the all-metal iter-like wall. the
machine is now going into a period of maintenance and will be ready to restart experiments in 2013. the eleven months of operation have been a busy and challenging time. the scientists at Jet have gathered a lot of valuable data. training has also been a big feature of the operation since control room sta were learning how to run the machine under the new conditions. covering ten or twelve operational shifts per week has been something of a challenge. 16
| JETInsight |
(Picture: EFDA)
Operating JET with an all-metal wall (as opposed to the previous carbon wall) required the development of different recipes to create, maintain and ramp down the plasma. By the end of the campaign, the heating and current drive systems had been routinely operating at high power. The neutral beam injection systems, in particular, had reached a record power of 25.8 megawatt. High plasma current operation (at up to 3.5 mega ampere) had also been demonstrated successfully. The high plasma energy required mitigating disruptions – plasma events that cause large heat loads at the vessel wall. One solution is to introduce a large puff of gas at precisely the correct moment to spread the heat of the plasma more uniformly over the inner wall, thus preventing excessive heating of small areas. This ‘disruption mitigation valve’ is now operating routinely and reliably to do that. The main reason for interrupting JET experiments is the removal of some of the 4500 new wall tiles for analysis. These tiles had been marked with special layers of beryl-
lium, molybdenum and tungsten. Careful laboratory examination of the marker layers will reveal which areas have been eroded by interaction with the plasma, and where that eroded material is deposited. One might think of this as being similar to erosion of part of a coastline by the action of the sea. The material that is removed from one place is washed along the coast and deposited somewhere else. A good understanding of this process in a tokamak can help us to make predictions regarding the lifetime of the plasma-facing components, and to estimate the amount of tritium that would be retained and buried under deposited layers. While the machine is out of action, there is an opportunity for other equipment to be maintained and for a parallel programme of work to be carried out which aims to improve the performance of the machine. Altogether, this work will ensure that JET keeps its leading position in magnetic confinement fusion research for years to come. ■ Nick Balshaw, CCFE
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FUSION IN EUROPE | JETInsight |
ENCOUR AGING WORK FOR ITER JET researchers are pleased as the 2011–2012 experimental period concludes
“W
e have ticked all the boxes for ITER” says Guy Matthews, project leader for the ITER-Like-Wall at JET. Sebastijan Brezinsek, who leads the JET Task Force responsible for the exploitation of the new wall, agrees: “We had to learn how to operate JET with the ITER-Like Wall” he says. “We have proved in the last experimental campaign that we can operate in the baseline H-mode scenario with high reproducibility, low disruption rate, and without tungsten events at all, even though operation is quite different to the carbon wall.” Brezinsek continues to explain: “The operational window for good confined H-mode is quite narrow, but we have learned how much fuelling and central heating is required to keep the divertor cool while still maintaining a minimum number of ELM events to flush the tungsten impurities.”
However, the cleaner plasma – without the carbon impurities that were ubiquitous with the previous wall tiles – has led to some unexpected behaviour. In the standard mode of operation, known as baseline, the confinement is not as good as in the best carbon references. Surprisingly, though, in the more advanced “hybrid” mode, the confinement with the ITER-Like Wall is comparable to that achieved with the carbon wall. ITER, however, will need to operate in both scenarios. “We will have to look into this,” says JET Close Support Unit operation group leader George Sips. “The confinement is probably less good because there is no beneficial radiation from the carbon in the plasma edge. Nobody would have expected that we need to make the plasma dirty to make it work
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better!” Initial experiments involving the seeding of the plasma with nitrogen to increase radiation appear to address the problem, but more experiments are needed to fully understand the situation. Experiments finished with a two-week campaign in which 150 identical pulses were produced over and over again, in order to build up a total of 900 seconds of stable operation – the equivalent of one pulse at ITER. As well as proving that plasma could be held stable in a tokamak for that long – these experiments are designed to test the materials of the ITER-Like Wall, to see how they behave during long term operation. Various tungsten and beryllium tiles will be removed from the vessel during the current maintenance shutdown period and analysed closely. “We have already measured the gas balance, but this will give us a complementary information about the longterm fuel retention and help us to understand which mechanisms are responsible,” says Sebastijan Brezinsek. These significant results for ITER come as the international organisation formalises its collaboration with JET by means of the IEA implementing agreement on Cooperation on Tokamak Programmes. Even before experiments had finished, the ITER Director General visited JET, to discuss future experiments, such as a deliberate melting of a number of tungsten tiles to see how this affects operation. ■ Phil Dooley, EFDA
| JETInsight |
JET GUESTbOOK Some of the around 920 visitors who paid a visit to JET from June through august: ■ 107 school students, along with 11 teachers, visited Jet and ccfe ■ 222 university students came for summer schools and tours of Jet and ccfe ■ 180 scientists and engineers from several institutions came for tours and discussions ■ 3 filmcrews took footage of Jet
From left: lorne Horton, Martin cox (ccFE), ITER DG osamu Motojima, Franscesco Romanelli, David campbell (ITER) (Picture: EFDA)
■ ITER director general Osamu Motojima visited JET for talks with EFDA Leader Francesco Romanelli. The two Leaders wish to enhance the collaboration of their programmes (see report on page 3). With Motojima-san were David Campbell, ITER Director of Plasma Operation, and ITER Senior Scientist Alberto Loarte. ■
■ Tonči Tadić from Croatia’s Ruđer bošković Institute in Zagreb visited EFDA and JET. He came for discussions about possible collaborations within the EURATOM Programme on the basis of Croatia joining the EU in 2013. The country is interested in participating in European fusion research activities. Tadić, who came on assignment for the Croatian Government, gave a presentation on Croatian fusion-related research activities and met with EFDA Leader Francesco Romanelli and EFDA Senior Advisor Duarte Borba. The initial ideas for collaboration that were formed during the talks include areas such as materials sciences and nuclear technology. ■
From left: Duarte Borba, Tonči Tadić, Francesco Romanelli (Picture: EFDA)
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FUSION in europe | Community | In dialogue |
JET INSPIRES
“JET Is vERy IMPoRTanT FoR THE FUTURE WHEn THE FossIl FUEls aRE UsED UP” … … concluded Zheng Ze, one of twenty one distinguished Chinese students who visited Culham as part of a study tour to the UK. Zheng Ze and his colleagues are among China’s brightest science and engineering students – each of them had been the best of their province in their final science and engineering exams. Now they are studying a range of scientific and engineering disciplines at Beijing’s
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(Picture: EFDA)
Tsinghua University, including electrical engineering, bioscience, mathematics, physics and computer science. Tsinghua University is often ranked as the first or second best university on mainland China in many national and international rankings. CCFE head of communications, Chris Warrick, introduced the young visitors to fusion before they went on a tour of JET. Apart from the machine itself, the remote handling unit raised much interest: “The arm is so long, I'm amazed it never falls down” exclaimed Qui Fan. ■
| Community | In dialogue
Y O U N G TA L E N T “ o U R T I M E aT J E T G av E U s E n o U G H M o T I v aT I o n T o PURsUE oUR DREaMs”
From left: Rasha Dewedar, nourwanda sourour, azza Faiad (Picture: EFDA)
I
n July Azza Faiad from Egypt, prize winner in the European Union Contest for Young Scientists visited JET. Azza and seven colleagues were top-ranking students from a total of 87 science projects in 37 countries. EIROforum, the partnership among Europe’s eight largest international laboratories, awarded each winner a week’s stay at their institutions. Azza’s project explored the methods of reprocessing plastic waste into usable hydrocarbons using catalytic cracking. Azza was accompanied by Nourwanda Sourour, an eighth term Gas and Petrochemicals Engineering student, who also acted as mentor to Azza’s project. Freelance journalist Rasha Dewedar also joined the duo to report on their life-changing experience. The three toured the various facilities at JET, had a go at the in-vessel training facility and took the opportunity to chat with researchers about their careers. “It is the first time that I have seen such a huge collaboration!” said Azza. “People from all over Europe work towards one goal, like one family.” About her meeting with JET scientist Joelle Vallory, Azza wrote in her report: “It was so inspiring to hear her story, she is an exceptional role model. On this visit, were given enough motivation to pursue our dream and believing that everything is possible and could be conducted by strong will and creative thinking.” ■
azza Faiad (left) and nourwanda sourour (Picture: EFDA)
From left: nourwanda sourour, Rasha Dewedar, azza Faiad (Picture: EFDA)
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FUSION in europe | NewsFlash |
NEWSFLASH Fusion: the energy of the universe – second edition Former CCFE scientists Gary McCracken and Peter Stott have updated their book Fusion: The Energy of the Universe, originally published in 2005. The book is an essential reference title on the subject of fusion research and covers the basic principles of fusion energy from its history to the present day. The new edition includes a brand new chapter on ITER. A second new chapter about inertial confinement programs also discusses the National Ignition Facility (NIF, US), Laser Mégajoule (LMJ, France), Fast Ignition Realization EXperiment (FIREX, Japan), and the High Power laser Energy Research facility (HiPER, proposed, Europe). The book’s chapter on fusion power plants has been expanded and now includes descriptions of the projected designs of the demonstration fusion power plant DEMO and the Laser Initial Fusion Energy project, LIFE. More information: http://tinyurl.com/stott-mccracken
Where is Fusion Expo? 19 September – 5 October 2012 SOFT 2012 Conference, Liège, Belgium A travelling exhibition financed by EFDA.
http://www.efda.org/fusion-expo Contact: Tomaž Skobe, tomaz.skobe@ijs.si
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Collaborators
28 European countries signed an agreement to work on an energy source for the future: EFDA provides the framework, JET, the Joint European Torus, is the shared experiment, fusion energy is the goal.
austrian academy of sciences AUSTRIA
B E LG I U M
Bulgarian academy of sciences B U LG A R I A
University of cyprus CYPRUS
Institute of Plasma Physics academy of sciences of the czech Republic CZECH REPUBLIC
University of Tartu E S TO N I A
Finnish Funding agency for Technology and Innovation FINLAND
commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives FRANCE
GERMANY
GERMANY
EURaToM Hellenic Republic GREECE
Wigner Research centre for Physics HUNGARY
Dublin University IRELAND
agenzia nazionale per le nuove tecnologie, l’energia e lo sviluppo economico sostenibile I TA LY
Ministère de l’Energie LU X E M B U R G
University of Malta M A LTA
Institute of Plasma Physics and laser Microfusion POLAND
Instituto superior Técnico PORTUGAL
Ministry of Education and Research ROMANIA
comenius University S LO VA K I A
Ministry of Education, science, culture and sport S LO V E N I A
centro de Investigaciones Energéticas Medioambientales y Tecnológicas S PA I N
swedish Research council SWEDEN
centre de Recherches en Physique des Plasmas SWITZERLAND
Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research THE NETHERLANDS
UNITED KINGDOM
association EURaToM – University of latvia L AT V I A
Technical University of Denmark DENMARK
Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik GERMANY
lithuanian Energy Institute LITHUANIA
Our partners:
FRANCE
F4E, S PA I N
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EUROPEAN FUSION DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENT
ISSN 1818-5355