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Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have launched a new effort to apply expertise in plasma to study and optimize the use of the hot, electrically charged gas as a tool for producing nanoparticles. This research aims to advance the understanding of plasma-based synthesis processes, and could lead to new methods for creating high-quality nanomaterials at relatively low cost.

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China could lead the way to a clean and boundless energy supply—if it can ever be made to work. Scientist Steven Cowley talks to online Chinese media Chinadialogue.

 

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MIT's tokamak, Alcator C-Mod, was faced with the threat of losing all of its federal funding throughout 2012. The loss of these funds, nearly the entire budget of C-Mod, would force the closure of the experiment, one of just three such devices in the U.S.   In September 2012, Congress passed a continuing resolution to provide six months of funding to C-Mod. The experiment is currently in "maintenance mode" rather than producing plasma, and scientists on the project are analyzing previously collected data. Members of the MIT Alcator C-Mod team hope to resume full operations once the FY 2013 budget is passed.

Adopting what they call "the scorpion's strategy," scientists at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility and colleagues at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have successfully applied state-of-the-art, real-time control of microwave power from gyrotrons, along with mirror aiming of the power, to catch and subdue "tearing modes" that break up the magnetic surfaces of the tokamak.

Tearing modes in tokamak plasmas can form magnetic islands that destroy toroidal symmetry and leak the energy. Researchers have found that the islands can be removed ("subdued") by applying precisely aligned electron cyclotron current driven by high-power microwave sources (gyrotrons), in much the same way that scorpions catch and subdue their prey, lying in ambush and waiting for the prey to approach and then seizing it with pincers.

Two years ago, Remmelt Haange took up his duties as Deputy Director-General for the ���ߺ��� Project Department. At ���ߺ���, the former Technical Director of the Wendelstein 7-X project faces familiar challenges, but also additional complexities.

American physicist Steven Chu has resigned as US Energy Secretary, effective once President Barack Obama names a successor. "I would like to return to an academic life of teaching and research," Chu wrote in a lengthy letter to employees at the Department of Energy.   Chu will enter the record books as the longest-serving Secretary in DOE's 35-year history, and the first Nobel laureate to lead the sprawling, $27 billion department.  

Mystery still surrounds the visit of the astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell to the Soviet Union in 1963. But his collaboration—and that of other British scientists—eased geopolitical tensions at the height of the Cold War and paved the way for today's global ���ߺ��� fusion project, as Richard Corfield explains in this month's issue of Physics World.    

One of the first things you learn about quantum mechanics is that particles have a wavelength, and thus a frequency. If the particle is in rest, this frequency is the Compton frequency and proportional to the particles' rest mass. It appears in the wavefunction of the particle at rest as a phase. This means basically the particle oscillates, even if it doesn't move, with a frequency directly linked to its mass.

The precision of atomic clocks in use today relies on the precise measurement of transition frequencies between energy levels in atoms which serve as reference for an oscillator. But via the Compton wavelength, the mass of a (stable) particle is also a reference for an oscillator. Can one therefore use a single particle to measure the passing of time?

Using a frozen hydrogen machine gun installed on the DIII-D magnetic fusion plasma experiment in San Diego, researchers were able to fire millimetre-sized pellets of frozen hydrogen into the edge of a 20 million degree fusion plasma, dramatically reducing the size of periodic edge disturbances called ELMs, which are similar to solar flares at the surface of the sun.

"The rapid-fire frozen-pellet machine gun technology actually triggers many smaller disturbances, effectively short-circuiting the plasma's natural tendency to have less requent, but much larger outbursts," said Dr. Larry Baylor of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the pellet gun was designed and built.

The research of a multi-institutional team from the U.S., Japan, and France, led by Predrag S. Krstic of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences and Jean Paul Allain of Purdue University has answered the question of how the behavior of plasma -- the extremely hot gases of nuclear fusion -- can be controlled with ultra-thin lithium films on graphite walls lining thermonuclear magnetic fusion devices.  

Little Janell Césaire, whose parents live in the small village of La Verdière, some 30 kilometres east of the ���ߺ��� site, was in a hurry to be born. On the night of 10 November 2012, as her mother was being rushed to the maternity hospital in Aix, she decided it was time for her to see the light of day—RIGHT AWAY.   Her family just had the time to stop at the ���ߺ��� roundabout, right in front of the ���ߺ��� gates. An emergency called was placed to the local firemen and gendarmes from Saint-Paul-lez-Durance who arrived in time to safely deliver the baby.

If you want to study nuclear fusion, why not build a miniature fusion device in your lab? Last week, first fusion reactions were produced in a device called a 'Fusor,' essentially designed and developed by students in the @email, a new facility operated for educational purposes by the TU/e plasma physics groups at Eindhoven University of Technology.   The picture shows the inside of the Fusor during an experiment last Friday where a fusion plasma produced almost a million neutrons per second, placing the device among a handful of best performing Fusors in the world.   We are looking through the window of a spherical vacuum chamber, containing a smaller sphere of glowing hot nickel wires ten centimeters across. A voltage of 55 kilovolts, applied to the nickel sphere, accelerates deuterium ions to energies high enough to allow fusion reactions to occur on collision with other deuterium ions or atoms. The high voltage is applied through a wire entering the Fusor from above, creating a bluish glow.   The promising results mean that, in parallel to its educational function, a research program will be set up around the Fusor in the group Science and Technology of Nuclear Fusion (TU/e department of Applied Physics).    

Three years ago, the picture for research funding in Japan looked bleak. As part of efforts to slash the national budget by ¥3 trillion (US$33.5 billion), the government, led by the Democratic Party of Japan, had proposed sweeping cuts to science, sparking protests from the country's most eminent researchers. Japan's flagship K supercomputer project narrowly escaped being shut down after auditors questioned whether Japan needed to host the world's fastest computer.

Fast-forward to 2013, and Shinzo Abe, head of the newly elected Liberal Democratic Party-led government, seems to have no such doubts. "Of course we must aim for number one," he told reporters after a tour of the supercomputer facility on 11 January.

A video of the ���ߺ��� HQ inauguration is available (Source: ���ߺ���)   The live interview of French Minister Geneviève Fioraso on France 3 TV channel can be viewed   Télé Locale Provence coverage of the ���ߺ��� HQ inauguration

On the occasion of his December visit to Russia, ���ߺ��� Director-General Osamu Motojima was the guest of Spotlight, the 26-minute daily interview program of Russia's international TV network Russia Today.  

A researcher at the Universidad politécnica de Madrid (UPM) has patented a nuclear fusion reactor by inertial confinement that, apart from be used to generate electric power in plants, can be applied to propel ships.   This invention is the result of a work carried out by the Professor José Luis González Díez from the Higher Technical School of Naval Engineering of the UPM, who has contributed to solve the problem of contamination risk associated with the generation of nuclear fission power. It is a design of a fusion nuclear reactor by laser ignition of 1000 MWe that uses as fuel hydrogen isotopes that can be extracted from water allowing us a significant saving in fuel.  

Staffers at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) had more than the holidays to celebrate this past Christmas Eve. The date marked the 30th anniversary of a scientific milestone that saw the Laboratory's Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) produce its first plasma—the superhot, electrically charged gas that fuels fusion reactions as a potential source of clean and abundant energy. The dramatic 1982 event climaxed months of furious preparation to meet a year-end deadline and ushered in more than a decade of record-setting experiments on the big PPPL machine. But that first step was hardly easy.

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Three teams led by scientists at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have won major blocks of time on two of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Two of the projects seek to advance the development of nuclear fusion by improving understanding of the superhot, electrically charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions.

In one project, researchers will use the computer time to simulate the dazzlingly complex conditions at the edge of magnetically confined tokamak plasmas. In another, researchers will study the rapid loss of plasma confinement caused by growing turbulence as fusion facilities become larger and more powerful.

Nuclear energy will remain a "prime candidate" as Europe considers its options for the decarbonization of its energy mix, according to a new study.   According to the study by international research and analysis company Frost & Sullivan, "nuclear energy is the answer to meeting aggressive EU targets on carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuels" and will be "a major contributor" to the European energy mix in 2020. ... Nuclear energy will remain a prime candidate as Europe mulls its decarbonising options. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) could "potentially" reduce the dependence on coal and gas. "However, this technology is still at a nascent stage with few demonstration projects having been implemented," the study notes.   "Renewables represent the best foreseeable option, but are cost-intensive. Moreover, it is not possible for renewables to compensate for the large-scale energy production, currently supported by nuclear sources, until the next decade."
 

In ���ߺ���, beryllium will enter the plasma because it is one of the constituent materials of the fusion chamber walls. The walls get eroded on contact with hot hydrogen plasma leading to the formation of beryllium in gaseous form and beryllium hydrides, BeH and BeH2, present in various forms of electric charge and state.

An international team of physicists has calculated the efficiency of a reaction involving an incoming electron kicking out an electron from the metal beryllium (Be) or its hydrogen compound molecules, in an article about to be published in EPJ D.

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