Assembly of ITER begins in Southern FranceNuclear NewsResearch & ApplicationsJuly 30, 2020, 12:09PM|Nuclear News StaffThose attending the livestreamed July 28 celebration in person (shown here from above) followed recommended social distancing measures.First-of-a-kind components have been arriving in recent months at the ITER construction site in Cadarache, France, from some of the 35 ITER member countries around the world. The arrival on July 21 of the first sector of the ITER vacuum vessel from South Korea marks the beginning of a four-and-a-half year machine assembly process for the world’s largest tokamak, a magnetic fusion device designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as an energy source.The ITER site in Cadarache, France.All eyes on Cadarache: On July 28, technical and civil leaders from ITER member countries celebrated the beginning of assembly with a global event hosted virtually by French President Emmanuel Macron and livestreamed on YouTube.As the host member for ITER, the European Union (with the United Kingdom and Switzerland) is funding 45 percent of the project’s cost. Each of the other members—the United States, China, Japan, Russia, India, and South Korea—is contributing 9 percent. Many of the components arriving in France are being provided as in-kind contributions.Buildings and civil works across the ITER site are the responsibility of Europe and are about 75 percent complete. The Tokamak Building and Assembly Hall have been completed and are linked by a 170-meter overhead crane rail supporting two 750-ton cranes that will transport and position components.The top lid of the cryostat, being manufactured in India, photographed on June 30.A three-dimensional puzzle: Assembling ITER is the responsibility of the central ITER organization. The work includes the assembly of the tokamak itself, as well as the parallel installation of support systems such as radio frequency heating, fuel cycle, cryogenics, cooling water, vacuum, control, and high voltage electrical systems.Bigot“Constructing the machine piece by piece will be like assembling a three-dimensional puzzle on an intricate timeline,” said Bernard Bigot, director-general of the ITER Organization.“Every aspect of project management, systems engineering, risk management, and logistics of the machine assembly must perform together with the precision of a Swiss watch,” Bigot said. “We have a complicated script to follow over the next few years.” At the completion of machine assembly, scheduled for December 2025, ITER scientists and engineers plan to demonstrate the machine’s function by initiating “First Plasma.”Principal assembly activities will take place in the Tokamak Building, where the ITER device will be installed in a partially embedded concrete bioshield. The circular tokamak will be preassembled in nine subassemblies in the adjacent Assembly Hall. Each 40-degree section will integrate a vacuum vessel sector, a protective silver-coated thermal shield, and two toroidal field coils.The burning goal: ITER is expected to produce about 500 MWt, which would translate to about 200 MWe if the plant were operated continuously and connected to the electric grid.In the tokamak, a few grams of deuterium and tritium will be heated to a cloud-like ionized plasma, shaped by 10,000 tons of superconducting magnets. Fusion would occur when the plasma reaches 150 million °C—10 times hotter than the core of the sun—releasing a huge amount of energy transmitted as heat.ITER is expected to be the first to achieve a “burning,” or self-heating, plasma. A potential commercial fusion plant would use the released heat energy to generate electricity using a steam turbine.Tags:fusionitertokamakShare:LinkedInTwitterFacebook
Understanding the ITER Project in the context of global Progress on Fusion(photo: ITER Project gangway assembly)The promise of hydrogen fusion as a safe, environmentally friendly, and virtually unlimited source of energy has motivated scientists and engineers for decades. For the general public, the pace of fusion research and development may at times appear to be slow. But for those on the inside, who understand both the technological challenges involved and the transformative impact that fusion can bring to human society in terms of the security of the long-term world energy supply, the extended investment is well worth it.Failure is not an option.Go to Article
General Fusion boasts backing from Shopify, Amazon foundersShopify founder Tobias Lütke is backing General Fusion with an undisclosed capital investment through his Thistledown Capital investment firm, the Canadian fusion technology firm announced January 14.In an article published the same day by TechCrunch, Jonathan Shieber noted that a separate investments by Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, first made through his venture capital fund nearly a decade ago, means General Fusion “has the founders of the two biggest e-commerce companies in the Western world on its cap table.”Go to Article
Fusion and the bounty of electricityFrom the time we discovered how the sun produces energy, we have been captivated by the prospect of powering our society using the same principles of nuclear fusion. Fusion energy promises the bounty of electricity we need to live our lives without the pollution inherent in fossil fuels, such as oil, gas, and coal. In addition, fusion energy is free from the stigma that has long plagued nuclear power about the storage and handling of long-lived radioactive waste products, a stigma from which fission power is only just starting to recover in green energy circles. Go to Article
The year in review 2020: Research and ApplicationsHere is a look back at the top stories of 2020 from our Research and Applications section in Newswire and Nuclear News magazine. Remember to check back to Newswire soon for more top stories from 2020.Research and Applications sectionARDP picks divergent technologies in Natrium, Xe-100: Is nuclear’s future taking shape? The Department of Energy has put two reactor designs—TerraPower’s Natrium and X-energy’s Xe-100—on a fast track to commercialization, each with an initial $80 million in 50-50 cost-shared funds awarded through the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. Read more.Go to Article
Powering the future: Fusion advisory committee sets prioritiesThe Fusion Energy Science Advisory Committee (FESAC), which is responsible for advising the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, on December 4 published the first public draft of Powering the Future: Fusion and Plasmas, a 10-year vision for fusion energy and plasma science. FESAC was charged with developing a long-range plan in November 2018.The scope: The report, which is meant to catch the eye of leaders in the DOE, Congress, and the White House, details the needs of the fusion and plasma program identified by a FESAC subcommittee—the DOE Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee for Long Range Planning—with the help of the fusion research community. The yearlong Phase 1 of the Community Planning Process, organized under the auspices of the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics, gathered input and yielded a strategic plan that is reflected in the FESAC’s draft report.Go to Article
U.K. seeks site for STEP fusion reactorThe United Kingdom’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has asked local governments to submit bids to host the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production project, or STEP, according to an article published by Bloomberg on December 1. The STEP plant will be developed by the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, which says that construction could begin as soon as 2032, with operations by 2040, and “will prove that fusion is not a far-off dream.”Go to Article
2020 ANS Virtual Winter Meeting: Fusion technology start-ups showcased at TOFE 2020The Fusion Enterprise-I and -II sessions, held on November 18 as part of the TOFE 2020 embedded topical meeting at the 2020 ANS Virtual Winter Meeting, were chaired by Ales Necas, principal scientist at TAE Technologies, and featured presentations by speakers representing companies in the commercial fusion area.Go to Article
A life in nuclear reactor physics and designYou may have read the abbreviated version of this article in the November 2020 issue of Nuclear News. Now here's the full article—enjoy!I have enjoyed a long and stimulating career in applied nuclear physics—specifically nuclear reactor physics, nuclear fusion plasma physics, and nuclear fission and fusion reactor design—which has enabled me to know and interact with many of the scientists and engineers who have brought the field of nuclear energy forward over the past half-century. In this time I have had the fortune to interact with and contribute (directly and indirectly) to the education of many of the people who will carry the field forward over the next half-century.Go to Article
A closer look at SPARC’s burning plasma ambitionsCutaway of the SPARC engineering design. Image: CFS/MIT-PSFC, CAD rendering by T. HendersonSeven open-access, peer-reviewed papers on the design of SPARC, Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ (CFS) fusion tokamak, written in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, were published on September 29 in a special edition of the Journal of Plasma Physics.The papers describe a compact fusion device that will achieve net energy where the plasma generates more fusion power than used to start and sustain the process, which is the requirement for a fusion power plant, according to CFS.The timeline for this planned device sets it apart from other magnetic confinement fusion tokamaks: Construction is to begin in 2021, with the device coming on line in 2025.CFS expects the device to achieve a burning plasma—a self-sustaining fusion reaction—and become the world’s first net energy (Q>1) fusion system. The newly released papers reflect more than two years of work by CFS and the Plasma Science and Fusion Center to refine their design. According to CFS, the papers apply the same physics rules and simulations used to design ITER, now under construction in France, and predict, based on results from existing experiments, that SPARC will achieve its goal of Q>2. In fact, the papers describe how, under certain parameters, SPARC could achieve a Q ratio of 10 or more.Go to Article
JPP lays out SPARC fusion physics basisCutaway of the SPARC engineering design. Image: CFS/MIT-PSFC, CAD Rendering by T. HendersonA special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics gives a glimpse into the physics basis for SPARC, the DT-burning tokamak being designed by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The special issue was announced in a September 29 post on the Cambridge University Press blog Cambridge Core.The special JPP issue includes seven peer-reviewed articles on the SPARC concept, which takes advantage of recent breakthroughs in high-temperature superconductor technology to burn plasma in a compact tokamak design.Go to Article