At the heart of deuterium-tritium fusion is the neutron. Each fusion event produces neutrons with an enormous amount of energy – 14.1 megaelectron volts. This is a million times more energy than is produced by burning coal, and manifests itself in the speed of the neutrons, which leave the reaction at about 50 000 kilometres per second.

These neutrons have more energy than those produced by fission, which typically have only a few megaelectron volts. This enormous amount of energy seems to be a goldmine for our future energy needs, however neutrons are a bit tricky to catch. Because they are uncharged they pass through the electron shells of atoms unhindered; it is only when they get close to nuclei that they interact – the charge of the quarks in the neutron interacts with the charge of protons and neutrons in the nuclei. At this range neutrons often trigger nuclear reaction with their interaction, thereby changing the nature of the material – the large numbers of neutrons of this energy produced by a fusion reactor would damage most conventional structural materials beyond repair within weeks. Furthermore the blanket around a fusion reactor needs to be able to use these neutrons to breed tritium from lithium, and convert the energy of the neutrons to heat that can generate steam to drive turbines.

These multiple material science challenges are being met by a number of research groups across Europe, who are examining the effects of neutrons, both in simulations and with small experiments that produce fast neutrons. These groups have come up with a number of possible designs for the lithium blanket, for example in ceramic pebbles, or as a layer of liquid lithium-lead, which will be tested in ITER. “Neutronics simulations suggest producing tritium in sufficient amounts in a fusion power plant is feasible,” says Dr Lee Packer of CCFE.

However research into the activation of the fusion-facing components is not as advanced. Neutronics experts such as Dr Packer are developing detailed understanding of the defects that neutrons cause in material structures. They have already whittled down the possible 66 000 reactions that neutrons could cause to a ‘mere’ 5096 important reactions, but more remains to be done, says Dr Packer. “We need a large scale neutron source, such as the proposed IFMIF or CTF, to qualify materials. We have simulations, but there is no substitute for experimental data. Of those 5096 reactions, only 470 have complete experimental data, so there is a lot to do!”

Source: EFDA

The contract for the supply of 70 radial plates to the ITER magnets system has been signed between Fusion for Energy (F4E) and the Consortium of SIMIC S.p.A and Constructions Industrielles de la Méditerranée (CNIM). This is one of the largest industrial contracts signed by F4E approximately in the range of 160 million EUR and is expected to run for a period of approximately four years. Given the fact that Europe is responsible for the supply of 10 out the 18 Toroidal Field (TF) coils of the ITER device, 70 radial plates will need to be manufactured in order to host in their grooves the circular superconducting conductors of the TF coils. The signature of this contract is an important milestone for Europe’s in-kind contribution to ITER following the successful manufacturing of two European prototypes, known for their unprecedented size and high tolerance. The production of the components will take place in Italy (SIMIC S.p.A) and France (CNIM) in state of the art facilities.

The function and characteristics of the radial plates in the ITER device:
The ITER device will operate with a system of superconducting magnets which relies on the Toroidal Field coils, the Central Solenoid, the Poloidal Field coils and the Correction coils.
Toroidal Field (TF) coils are “D” shaped coils whose core task in the ITER device is the confinement of plasma.

The radial plate is one of the components of the TF coils. This D-shaped stainless steel plate measures 13.4 m x 8.7 m x 0.12 m. The radial plate has on each side spiral round-shaped grooves which are closed by cover plates.

The superconducting conductor of the TF coils, once heat treated and electrically insulated, is inserted into the grooves of the radial plates. In order to successfully fit the superconductor into the radial plate grooves, its trajectory must match that of the radial plate. It is for this reason that all grooves of the radial plates are machined according to the as-built trajectory of the double pancake conductor. Afterwards, the radial plate is electrically insulated and impregnated with epoxy resin, forming a so-called double pancake module. Then, seven double pancake modules are stacked, electrically connected and impregnated together to form a winding pack, the core structure of the TF coil. Finally, the winding pack is inserted in a welded stainless steel shell, known as the coil case, to form the TF coil.

Each TF coil is composed of five regular and two side double pancakes. 
A total of 70 radial plates will be supplied by F4E (50 regular and 20 side radial plates) for the 10 TF coils to be supplied by Europe.

Source: EFDA

"The challenge for us is to attract Israeli start-ups."

PARIS – France’s culture and cuisine have long made it the most popular tourist destination on the planet, but French authorities face a more difficult task when it comes to attracting non-European companies and investors.
Faced with stagnant growth and near-record unemployment of 10.6 percent, the government of the world’s fifth-largest economy is introducing new measures that it hopes will improve its reputation and entice foreign firms – including Israeli ones – to establish operations there.
Around 100 Israeli companies operate in France, employing more than 2,400 locals, according to Serge Boscher, managing director of the Invest in France Agency, which is responsible for “job-creating investment.” These companies cover agriculture, plastics, transport, logistics and other industries, and are seen as just the tip of the potential iceberg.
“The challenge for us is to attract Israeli start-ups,” Boscher says, referring to hi-tech pioneers in biotech and clean-tech. “Israeli companies are very innovative, and we need this high level of innovation.”
Moody’s recent announcement that it was stripping France of its AAA credit rating seemed to underpin international sentiment over the country’s economic performance.
The agency said a number of factors influenced the decision, including France’s sustained loss of competitiveness and the rigidness of its labor, goods and service markets.
Boscher is confident that the international market will ignore Moody’s decision. However, he points out that it provides an incentive for France to push ahead with reforms, including the “competitiveness pact” announced earlier this month.
The Socialist government of President Francois Hollande promised 20 billion euros in tax credits to companies over a three-year period, beginning in 2013.
Its announcement came one day after a government-commissioned report by Louis Gallois, former chief of Airbus parent company EADS, recommended that tax breaks be implemented over one or two years for immediate effect. Gallois warned that high labor costs were reducing the profit margins of businesses, leaving them little to invest in product innovation.
The second key element to improving France’s combativeness, according to Boscher, is a successful conclusion to the “Social Conference” – negotiations between unions and business leaders that the government hopes will usher in a new era of compromise.
France, long famed for labor strikes that paralyze entire industries, is looking to neighboring Germany’s “social dialogue” for inspiration.

An anemic auto industry 

France’s all-important auto industry has been hard hit by Europe’s economic crisis, as shown by Peugeot Citroen’s decision earlier this year to layoff 10% of its domestic workforce of 80,000 employees.
Officials at Renault, France’s other famous car-maker, say their company has managed to soften the blow from falling European demand through its 13-year old cross-continental alliance with Nissan (joined recently by a third partner, Germany’s Daimler Group).
Renault holds a 43.4% stake in Nissan, while its Japanese counterpart holds a 15% stake in Renault, ensuring that both partners have a mutual self-interest – and more importantly, enabling them to manufacture almost one-tenth of their vehicles in their partner’s plants.
“For the European auto sector, the biggest problem is overcapacity,” Renault Nissan Alliance communications director Rachel Konrad explains.
“Depending who you talk to, there is 20-30% more production than purchases. The way the laws are set, you have to continue paying workers, so it’s incredibly inefficient if they’re not producing anything. The fact that our Normandy plant cannot only produce Renault’s engines, but also Nissan’s and Daimler’s, is beneficial and increases job security. No other company can do this.”
The alliance also helps boost sales, according to Jacques Verdonck, Alliance Director in charge of coordination with Daimler.
“What we have achieved is to be less dependent on the European market,” Verdonck says, pointing out that more than 50% of Renault vehicles are sold outside the continent – including Russia, where the alliance has 32.9% market share, and Brazil, where is has 7.7% market share.
On the production side, Renault has been a pioneer in Zero Emission vehicles. Its Fluence ZE electric cars hit Israeli and Danish roads this year, thanks to a partnership with Israel’s Better Place – which operates dozens of battery-replacement stations for the vehicles in both countries.
Renault officials declined to comment on the performance of their partner – which removed founder Shai Agassi as CEO in October and has lost around $500 million since its establishment in 2007. However, they point out that electric vehicles are an earlystage technology, which means they are reliant on customer feedback and on differences in regulations between countries.
“We have gotten more than 50,000 electric vehicles on the road [in total]. I don’t think anybody, internally, thought it would be easy,” Konrad says.
“I have been working in electric vehicles since 2008, and if you read the media four years ago, they said, ‘everybody will switch to electric vehicles.’ Internally, people were saying, “no, this is a gradual shift, a significant, important segment for our industry and for our planet, but it’s not going to be immediate.’” 

ITER: Fostering fusion

France is literally miles ahead of its neighbors in at least one form of transportation: long-distance trains.

The TGV high-speed rail service completes the 750-kilometer journey between Paris and Marseille in just over three hours. It departs the capital’s Gare du Nord station, moves southeast through the green pastures of Burgundy and the foothills of the Alps, arriving at Marseille’s Saint Charles Station.
From there it is a short metro ride to the city’s ancient Mediterranean port.
The port area is changing dramatically thanks to Euroméditerranée, Europe’s biggest urban renewal project. Backed by funding from the European Union and ANIMA Investment Network – a group of government development agencies in the Mediterranean basin – some 500,000 sqm. is already built or under construction, with expectations this will double by 2020.
Marseille will be thrust into the spotlight when the city assumes the revolving title of European Capital of Culture in 2013. But it is 60km. away, in Cadarache, that the region’s most ambitious project is being conducted – at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).
Funded and run by seven members – the EU, US, China, Japan, South Korea, India and Russia – ITER is the largest experiment ever conducted to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy. Construction on the Tokamak reactor began in August 2010, with completion expected this decade.
Once operational, the reactor will produce electricity via several steps: it will heat deuterium and tritium plasma to more than 100 million °C; keep hot plasma away from walls by strong magnetic fields; use high energy helium nuclei to sustain burning plasma; neutrons will transfer their energy to what is known as a “blanket”; and finally, in a fusion power plant, a conventional steam generator, turbine and alternator will transform the heat into electricity.
This will not be the first time nuclear fusion is used to produce electricity; JET, located in Britain, achieved its first plasma in 1983.
But if everything goes to plan, ITER will generate 500 megawatts of energy for just 50 megawatts invested – and that will be a first, explains spokesman Robert Arnoux.
“ITER will not produce electricity; it will just demonstrate that we can do it. It will demonstrate that we can do it for a rather long duration, and it will demonstrate that we can amplify the action,” he says.
Proponents of nuclear fusion point out that it produces no CO2 or other greenhouse gases, leaves no long-lasting radioactive waste, and provides an almost limitless supply of fuel that can be widely distributed around the globe.
Additionally, Arnoux points out, it cannot be used in the proliferation of weapons – as it lacks the heavy elements that go into an atomic or hydrogen bomb.
“This explains why the US and the Soviet Union cooperated on nuclear fusion in the late 1950s, during the hottest period of the Cold War,” he says. “Everyone has realized that there were no military implications, because there was no proliferation issue.”
Right now, all that can be seen of the reactor are its foundations – one level of several hundred seismic pads, enclosed by thick retaining walls, which will isolate the reactor from ground motion in the event of an earthquake. Most of the reactor’s components are being constructed abroad, by the member states.
The largest and heaviest loads will arrive at the harbor of Fos-sur- Mer, and transported along a specially created 104km.-long route to Cadarache.
When completed, the Tokamak will weigh 23,000 tons, and reach a height of 73 meters – slightly taller than the Arc de Triomphe.
If all of this sounds like a distant, almost utopian vision – it is, admits Arnoux. He estimates that an industrial prototype is achievable by the year 2050, but that there is no certainty it will prove commercially viable.
“We know that it will work, but the problem is whether it will work very well, or just average,” he says.
“Our industrial blueprint is crazy; no industry builds a machine this way, but this is inherent to the project.
“This project is not only about science and technology; it is about teaching the world how to build this fabulous machine.”

The writer visited France as a guest of the Invest in France Agency.

Source: The Jerusalem Post

The contract for the supply of nine Pre-Compression Rings (PCRs), among which three spares, that will support the ITER machine’s magnet system, has been signed between Fusion for Energy (F4E) and EADS CASA Espacio. The total budget of the contract is in the range of 12 million EUR and it is expected to run for approximately four years. 
The key function of PCRs is to reduce the fatigue of the ITER machine’s magnet structures from the powerful electro-magnetic forces and consequently prolong their operation from ten to over twenty years. The signature of the PCRS contract marks another European milestone that will deliver the largest composite structures ever built for operation in a cryogenic environment. The work will be carried out in a centre of excellence located in Spain, which has a proven track record in field of composites for space applications.

The function of PRCs in the ITER machine:
The ITER machine will operate with a system of superconducting magnets which relies on the Toroidal Field coils, the Central Solenoid, the Poloidal Field coils and the Correction coils (see ITER image). 
Toroidal Field (TF) coils are “D” shaped coils whose core task in the ITER device is the confinement of plasma. PRCs are the keystones of the TF coils system and will be assembled to the top and bottom of TF coils in order to prevent them from deforming when the powerful magnetic field is created.

The size of the PCRs, their assembly and maintenance: 
The basic design relies on 5 m diameter fibreglass composite rings with a cross section of about 300 mm x 300 mm at top and three at the bottom of the TF coil system. Three PCRs will be installed and loaded at the top and three at the bottom of the TF coil system and will apply a centripetal force equivalent to that of 3,000 tonnes on the top and bottom of each TF coil reducing their overall constraints.
In order to avoid the circulation of electrical currents and withstand high loads, the PCRs will be manufactured of fibreglass composite, where in every cross section nearly a billion of miniscule glass fibres will be glued together.
Their load will need to be maintained for the entire 20 years of ITER operation, while accommodating thermal shrinkages during cool-down/warm-up, cyclic forces, settlements and unexpected motions. Due to the limited access to carry out in-service inspection of the PCRs, in case there is a need for the replacement of the lower PCRs, it will be carried out by using one or more of three spare rings made available below the Tokamak in the cryostat.

Source: F4E

The heat source is a particle beam named Elise (Extraction from a Large Ion Source Experiment), and was unveiled at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching near Munich on 27th of November. It represents a major step forward not only in the energy of the particles, but also in the size of the beam; its cross-section is about half the area of the final models planned for ITER, reckoned as being the size of a door.

Elise is the largest device of its kind in the world, eclipsing the dinner-plate sized neutral beam heaters at JET. However it is planned to only retain that crown for the next two years, at which point MITICA, a neutral beam facility in Padova, Italy, will come online, with a full size prototype of one of ITER’s heating beams.

The successive generations of test facilities are important because ITER’s high energy beams use negative ion beams, a different technology to most existing systems. All accelerated ion beams need to be neutralised just before they enter the vessel so that they can penetrate the magnetic field. Lower energy systems, such as JET, accelerate positive ions; however positive ions present a problem because at the higher energies required to penetrate deeply into ITER’s large plasma it is almost impossible to re-attach electrons to neutralise the ions. Instead the new systems will accelerate negative ions, which are harder to create and have a very short lifetime, but have a much higher neutralisation efficiency (around 60 percent at 1 megavolt).

The ion beam is created by injecting a high frequency RF wave in hydrogen, thereby creating a plasma. This plasma is then brought into contact with a material with loosely bound electrons, for example caesium. The hydrogen picks up electrons from the material, creating negative ions, which are then separated by a complex series of water cooled grids from the other species – such as electrons, which are also negatively charged.

The Elise experiment will be conducted within IPP’s newly established “ITER Technology and Diagnostics” research division headed by Prof. Dr. Ursel Fantz.

The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics is one of three German signatories to the European Fusion Development Agreement.

Source: EFDA