When the new Wendelstein 7-X facility for researching nuclear fusion as a future energy source becomes operational in 2014, it will also incorporate high-precision work and scientific expertise from Poland.

Although scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) will play a leading role in the construction of the research facility in Greifswald, quite a few partners will also participate. After the USA, Poland will provide the largest contribution through two cooperative projects. The close of 2012 saw completion of a key six-year project: superconduction technology experts from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow connected the 50 superconducting electromagnets – the technical centrepiece of the facility – together in a ring. Around 45 technicians and engineers assembled 121 superconductors up to 14 m long, as well as 240 connectors and 400 supports that had been manufactured at the Forschungszentrum Jülich. When the research facility is operational, current flows through the ring and creates a magnetic cage. This magnetic cage - when hydrogen nuclei are to ignite the fire of fusion and melt into helium nuclei at 100 million degrees Celsius in a future power plant – is prerequisite for containing the plasma to maintain stable, continuous energy production. 

After the departure of the technical staff from Cracow, cooperative efforts will continue with the National Centre for Nuclear Research in Swierk, Poland: The accelerator experts there will take care of production of components for neutral particle heating at Wendelstein 7-X. High-speed particles will be fired into the plasma to help heat it. Manufacturing orders have already been placed with Polish and other European industrial companies. 

Around two-thirds of the costs for both projects are being carried by the Polish Ministry of Science, which made available a total of 6.5 million euros and wants to build its fusion research programme around Wendelstein 7-X. In addition, IPP is funding plasma diagnostics in the form of cooperative projects with universities in Warsaw and Opole. In future, Polish scientists will also carry out research projects directly at Wendelstein 7-X.

Source: Max Planck Institutes

The JET shutdown is progressing steadily. Remote Handling Group has been working in-vessel since December. The first task was to conduct a full photographic survey of the inside of the vessel, so that the effects of a year of plasma operations on the ITER-like wall can be assessed. Scientists are now poring over the photographs in detail.

Meanwhile various components have been removed from the torus for closer examination. The tiles in the divertor region (at the bottom of the torus) are fixed to ‘carriers’, and around 20 of these carriers have been removed. They have been transferred to the Beryllium Handling Facility for maintenance of some of the embedded diagnostic systems and removal of a few tiles.

About 600 individual tiles and components have also been removed. Most of these will be replaced without modification, but it was necessary to remove this number in order to gain access to about 50 in particular regions of interest. The 50 will be analysed in laboratories around Europe to look for evidence of erosion and deposition. As many of the tests will be destructive, they will be replaced by brand new tiles as the 600 are re-assembled. Already more than half the tiles taken from the poloidal limiters are back in place.

The next instalment will cover calibration of some diagnostic systems.

Source: EFDA

ENGINEERINGNET.EU – The engineering company Air Liquide has secured two contracts to build extreme cryogenic systems for the ITER and the related JT-60SA research projects on fusion. The total value of these equipment sales contracts will reach over €100million.

Based near Marseille, in France, the ITER project plans the creation of an experimental reactor intended to illustrate the scientific and technical feasibility of fusion. This process generates little waste and eliminates any risk of reactor runaway. 

To obtain the very powerful electromagnetic fields necessary to confine fusion, superconducting magnets must be used, which only work at extremely low temperatures.

For this project, Air Liquide will provide the biggest centralized refrigeration system ever built. This cryogenic equipment is essential for maintaining an extremely cold temperature for the 10,000 tonnes of superconducting magnets used on the Tokamak. 

This sophisticated scientific instrument confines the plasma that makes it possible to achieve the conditions necessary for controlled fusion. The closed circuit refrigeration system is based on the properties of liquefied helium, whose temperature is close to the lowest possible temperature 0 K, or -273°C, called "absolute zero". 

Between the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2017, Air Liquide will install three refrigerators for a global cooling capacity of 75 kW at 4.5 K, or - 269 °C.

The purpose of another project, JT-60SA, is to support the ITER project's research activities by working on the capacity to control and maintain the plasma for several hours. 

JT-60SA, based in Japan, is designed to optimize plasma configurations for the ITER project. It is led by the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency in collaboration with the French organisation CEA. For this project, Air Liquide will commission, in 2015, a helium refrigeration system, intended to cool the Tokamak.

François Darchis, Senior Vice-President: "After the CERN's LHC and Kstar in Korea, these projects once again prove our capacity to meet major scientific challenges by supplying very high tech systems." << (BB) (photo: Air Liquide, cryogenic system at CERN)

Source: engineeringnet.eu

A five year quest has borne fruit with the COMPASS tokamak in Prague’s Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) achieving H-mode performance. The milestone marks a new era for fusion research in the Czech Republic, which began in 2007 when the COMPASS tokamak was transferred from the CCFE in UK.

“We have historical links which made us a regional centre for scientists from Hungary, Bulgaria and Poland, but now scientists from West Europe have also been visiting COMPASS – it’s another meeting point for the fusion community.” says fusion scientist Dr Jan Mlynář from IPP.

“It is very important that we can now do H-mode operation as this is the standard ITER scenario. We have invested lots of money into making an “ITER-like” operation scenario, in particular we purchased new heating neutral beams to achieve relevant ion temperatures and thus hopefully create Type I ELMs.”

Now the ITER-like mode of operation has been established, COMPASS can be used as a small scale test bed for ITER performance: combining COMPASS’s results with similar tests in ASDEX Upgrade (three times larger) and JET (six times larger) gives excellent extrapolation to ITER (ten times larger).

However, for some studies the overall size does not matter, and in these areas COMPASS really comes into its own. H-mode’s high confinement stems from a sharp increase in the pressure at the edge of the plasma, known as the edge transport barrier or pedestal; COMPASS’s ability to reproduce H-mode makes it arguably as useful a device as the bigger machines in studying this plasma edge phenomenon, says Dr Mlynář.

“We can now measure and detail properties of this pedestal. All machines that have H-mode have this edge pedestal, however nobody really understands the details of physics behind this pedestal… Our advantage is that we are not so expensive and so “heavy” in operation. It is simpler to test different ideas or different new hardware.”

“Also, big machines are usually overbooked – scientists need a really good reference to get research time at ASDEX or JET, and promising results from smaller tokamaks is a very good reference.”

With the result in Prague coinciding with the recent release of EFDA’s road map to fusion, it’s clear that COMPASS will have a significant part to play in the navigation towards the goal of fusion energy!

The Institute of Plasma Physics is the Czech Republic’s signatory to the European Fusion Development Agreement.

Source: EFDA