A team of experts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is taking aim at one of the biggest challenges facing the international ITER fusion facility: turning cold gas into wine-cork-sized, solid pellets to help keep ITER’s plasma in check.
–Adriana Ghiozzi for US ITER First-of-a-kind experiments have begun at the KSTAR tokamak in Daejeon, South Korea, where two new shattered pellet injectors were installed in October and December. The tandem use of shattered pellet injectors installed at opposite sides of the machine is a first for the technology, which was developed and fabricated at […]
The international ITER fusion project is building “a sun on earth” that will produce a self-heated, burning plasma—a key step toward industrial-scale fusion energy production. Controlling that plasma can be tricky, though, because disruptions may occur that cool and collapse the plasma. Sudden losses of plasma energy and current have the potential to erode plasma-facing […]
ITER, the international fusion research facility now under construction in St. Paul-lez-Durance, France, has been called a puzzle of a million pieces.
ITER, the world’s first reactor-scale fusion machine, will have a plasma volume more than 10 times that of the next largest tokamak, JET. Plasma disruptions that can occur in a tokamak when the plasma becomes unstable can potentially damage plasma-facing surfaces of the machine. To lessen the impact of high energy plasma disruptions, US ITER […]
Computer codes calculate nuclear heating, neutron radiation damage and activation of fusion reactor materials. ―Lynne Degitz US ITER researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are developing advanced processes to assess ITER’s unique tokamak components and materials in the presence of the tremendous amount of neutron flux and energy released by […]
―Agatha Bardoel Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Fusion Pellet Fueling Lab has been at the center of design and testing of plasma fueling systems for tokamak research applications for decades. Since the mid-1970s, lab researchers have been designing, testing, and contributing hardware for fusion magnetic confinement experiments here in the United States and around the world. […]