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Scientists at the UK's Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) have run final experiments on the MAST tokamak on Friday 27 September before starting a major overhaul of the device that will pave the way for a prototype fusion plant.

"It's a bittersweet moment for us because we are saying goodbye to the old machine but at the same time, we are already looking forward to the new one," said the CCFE spokesman Nick Holloway.

"At 4pm today, we will run the last plasmas and within minutes after that, engineers will move in to shut down the tokamak for the next 18 months. By Monday, the roof beams in the MAST machine area will have been taken off before the 25-tonne MAST vessel will be lifted on a big crane and moved to the assembly hall."

The £30m upgrade is set to make MAST (the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak), a cutting edge facility. It will increase its power and enable testing technologies that will improve the knowledge base needed for the construction of ���ߺ���, but also to test systems for the DEMO prototype fusion power plant.

 

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The European Domestic Agency (Fusion for Energy) has produced a new clip on ���ߺ��� site works. See the two-minute video on ���ߺ���'s critical networks .

​The sun pours out an amazing amount of energy. Only a small fraction of the sun's total output reaches us, yet it powers our entire ecosystem. All the plants and animals on planet earth rely on this warmth for light and food. Surprisingly, though, the sun is not a terribly good fusion reactor, for its size. In terms of power output per volume, JET at its best is over 700 times better, and ���ߺ��� will be a staggering 2,150 times more efficient fusion reactor than the sun.

���ߺ���'s plasma volume will be 840 cubic metres, which with the target of 500 megawatt output power equates to nearly 600 kilowatts per cubic metre—the most efficient fusion reactor not only on Earth, but in the whole solar system!

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​At first, it's hard to know whether to take the company known as  (PSS) seriously. For one thing, the PSS offices, a few rooms in a nondescript building in nondescript Plainsboro, N.J., right above the Sugar and Sunshine Bakery, don't exactly suggest the imminent conquest of the final frontier. The company's ambitions, by contrast, certainly do — but those sound so crazy that you have to wonder if they're serious. This team of a half-dozen or so scientists and engineers is determined to send human beings to Mars, launch robotic probes to the outer solar system, send missions to Alpha Centauri and more, and do it all with rockets powered by nuclear fusion.

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​Welcome to the premiere issue of "Quest," the annual magazine of the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). We are pleased to provide this news of our strides in advancing research into fusion energy and plasma science—two topics of vital interest to the United States and the world.

Read Quest .

​Measuring the number of neutrons produced is one of the most basic yardsticks of success of a fusion experiment, yet it's surprisingly tricky to ensure your neutron detectors are calibrated correctly, says the leader of the team that has just finished calibrating JET's neutron diagnostic systems.

"The physics was only a part of the activity," says Project Leader, Dr Brian Syme. "Obtaining the neutron source, the safety issues and all the engineering developments associated with source handling were three quarters of the project!"

The process sounds simple enough — simply hold a radioactive source that produces a known number of neutrons at a set of known locations in the torus. From the detector counts you have an answer. However to get to that moment took the team three years of careful planning, including intensive neutronics calculations by colleagues in the Slovenian and Swedish associations.

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​Chinese and American scientists have successfully conducted their first joint test of two fusion reactors.

The experiment on the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), a fusion energy reactor built by Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the DIII-D, a tokamak machine developed by General Atomics in the USA, found that it's feasible for a tokamak fully relying on bootstrap current and non-induced current to run in a high-performance and steady way, Anhui Daily reported, citing the Hefei-based institute.   Read more

 

​Follow this link for a with Stephen O. Dean, a 50-year fusion veteran and the founder of Fusion Power Associates.

​Science is awesome. Physics is awesome! Here is a photo collection of huge and fantastical scientific experiments and machinery, including the European tokamak, JET.

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​VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland's research results indicate that joint planning of the reactor structure and remote maintenance system can significantly improve the utilisation rates of future fusion power plants. Designing a reactor with the simplest structure possible can reduce maintenance periods, as well as building expenses and overhead costs. Since 1995, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has participated in two international projects aimed at building a full-scale fusion reactor and commercialising fusion as an energy source.

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​Fission-ignited fusion systems have been operational — in weapon form — since the 1950s. Leveraging insights gained from the weapons physics program, a Z-Pinch device could be used to ignite a thermonuclear deuterium trigger. The fusion neutrons will induce fission reaction in a surrounding uranium or thorium liner, releasing sufficient energy to further confine and heat the fusion plasma.

The combined energy release from fission and fusion would then be directed using a magnetic nozzle to produce useful thrust. This type of concept could provide the efficiency of open cycle fusion propulsion devices with the relative small size and simplicity of fission systems; and would provide a radical improvement in our ability to explore destinations across the solar system and beyond. This proposal is modified version of last year's proposal - addressing issues raised during that evaluation.

Read more and see the video on the  website.

By Jeff Garberson

In the mid-1950s, the small, secret weapons laboratory that eventually became Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was more vulnerable than is commonly recognized to being marginalized or closed, according to a physicist who is studying the Laboratory's early years.   After three failed nuclear tests in the early to mid 1950s, there were recommendations in influential government circles that the young laboratory either be closed or reduced to a mere support role for Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, the physicist found.  In another surprising finding, the reversal of fortune that brought success and recognition to the young Livermore laboratory in the late 1950s may have resulted from the illnesses of three of the laboratory's leaders, Ernest Lawrence, Edward Teller and Herbert York in 1954. They were laid up for months, forcing the responsibility of scientific leadership on to the shoulders of two brilliant, young physicists, John Foster and Harold Brown.   The originality of these two scientists and the teams they assembled led to nuclear weapon design changes that were soon demonstrated in successful explosive tests, which led to warheads small enough to fit on submarine-carried missiles. They altered the nuclear arsenal forever.   Read more at . 

John Greenwald

Leading experts from around the world gathered at the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in July to focus on a key issue for the development of fusion energy: Improving ways to predict and mitigate disruptions that can destroy magnetically confined plasmas that are needed for fusion reactions.

Confronting this challenge will be crucial for ���ߺ���. "The future of magnetic fusion research hangs on ���ߺ��� being successful," said Amitava Bhattacharjee, head of the Theory Department at PPPL, which convened the 17-19 July workshop. "And ���ߺ��� will need to avoid disruptions or mitigate them when they occur."

Workshop participants from left: PPPL Director Stewart Prager and Theory Head Amitava Bhattacharjee with David Campbell, director of plasma operations at ���ߺ���. (Photo by Elle Starkman/ PPPL Office of Communications)

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​When you take a flight on a jet aircraft you must go through a number of checkpoints in the airport before and after your flight — security, passport control and so on. The JET fusion experiment also has its own "airport" — the Beryllium Handling Facility: everything that goes in to and comes out of JET is processed there.

Calling it the Beryllium Handling Facility is perhaps inaccurate, as it is not only beryllium that is processed here. As well as the beryllium, which is toxic to humans, there are also radioactive components to be dealt with; either components that retain traces of radioactive tritium fuel, or that have been left radioactive by bombardment from neutrons emitted during fusion reactions. Within the three sealed workshops in the large assembly hall adjacent to the JET torus hall, components are inspected and cleaned, and waste is separated and bagged up ready for storage.   Plasma-Wall Interaction Physicist Dr Kalle Heinola refurbishing a tile diagnostic in the beryllium handling facility.  

Read more on the  website.

​A new bumper edition of Fusion in Europe is now for download.

  This issue features all the news and pictures from JET's thirtieth anniversary celebrations. The motto for the celebrations cast our mind forward: "30 years of JET — Paving the way to ���ߺ���'s take off". Fusion in Europe continues this theme, with articles covering training programmes, young faces in fusion and preparations for DEMO.   Looking around the world of fusion there are updates from Padua, Prague, Cadarache and Korea, and we get a view from EU Commissioner for Energy Günther Oettinger giving his opinion on fusion's role in a low carbon future.   Also, a photo gallery of JET's 30th anniversary .

 

​The DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Research () program has awarded 809 million supercomputing core-hours to 13 new projects at Argonne to pursue "high-risk, high-payoff" simulation research in energy-mission areas and national emergency mitigation. The awards will spur research into areas including fusion energy, aqueous ion batteries, fuel cell science, earth-system models, jet engine design, and solar energy.

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​A key issue for the development of fusion energy to generate electricity is the ability to confine the superhot, charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions in magnetic devices called tokamaks. This gas is subject to instabilities that cause it to leak from the magnetic fields and halt fusion reactions.

Now a recently developed imaging technique can help researchers improve their control of instabilities. The new technique, developed by physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), the University of California-Davis and General Atomics in San Diego, provides new insight into how the instabilities respond to externally applied magnetic fields.

This technique, called Electron Cyclotron Emission Imaging (ECEI) and successfully tested on the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics, uses an array of detectors to produce a 2D profile of fluctuating electron temperatures within the plasma.

Read more at .

Image credit: Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion

​Get an exclusive sample of the actual tokamak fusion sound .

​A new educational currency in the world of fusion becomes available this month with the launch of European Fusion Masters and Doctorate Certificates. The certificates are awarded by FuseNet, Europe's fusion education network, to recognize students with a high level of specialization in fusion, says Professor Niek Lopes Cardozo, chair of FuseNet: "Fusion is an exciting, interdisciplinary field. Our students [are] a group with special qualities and we want to recognize that. 'Fusion' is a quality brand; the certificate is a quality stamp."

The launch comes at a time when there is growing discussion of the preparation of Generation ���ߺ���. Writing in Science magazine, journalist Dan Clery drew attention to an "awkward gap" for fusion personnel that could eventuate between JET and ���ߺ���, and it is precisely this issue that FuseNet's new certification addresses.

"FuseNet plays an important role in preparing the ���ߺ��� generation," says Duarte Borba, senior advisor to the EFDA leader. "A new generation of scientists and engineers are needed to operate ���ߺ��� and to develop the science and technology required to build a fusion power plant."   Read more on website.

Professor Miklos Porkolab, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT and professor in the MIT's Department of Physics, received the 2013 Hannes Alfvén Prize at a ceremony held in Espoo (Helsinki), Finland on 1 July.   The honour, given annually by the European Physical Society (EPS) during their Conference on Plasma Physics, recognizes outstanding work in the field of plasma science and fusion research.   Porkolab was cited "for his seminal contributions to the physics of plasma waves and his key role in the development of fusion energy."   Read more