ITER Talks (1): Introduction to ITER

[Music] welcome to the eater talks this is the first in what we hope will be an extended series of discussions on fusion and the eater project and hopefully for a public audience and widely disseminated first of all my task will be to give you the introduction to eater where we say it is opening the way to a new energy future here you can see the the eater site the overview of the eater site you can see that the site is about one kilometer long and about 400 meters wide it is uh you see in the very center the large building the tokamak building with the assembly hall as a unit you see in the foreground uh the the eater heating systems all the way in the very very back you see the electrical switch yard and along the far side you see a few of the of the factories where components that are too big to ship are being manufactured here on site we'll get into much more of those details but before we do i want to talk a little bit about the logic about why each or why why have all these countries come together to build this this uh magnificent research machine why are they spending the money why are they investing in fusion so the first is really quite obvious we have a gigantic dilemma related to the need for clean energy we know that electricity is the vector of civilization it's civilizational development we know that we have about 1.6 billion humans that are still not even connected to the grid and we see constantly statistics about what we can expect by 2030 or 2050 in terms of the additional need for for more energy to to fuel our our lifestyles and our needs we want to become more efficient but we also know that electricity has a direct relationship to development and so the question is how do we how do we do that we also know that the use of fossil fuels is uh is having a huge impact on our planet because the waste from fossil fuels goes directly into the atmosphere so the question that we really have is how do we meet a vision in which we decarbonize the production of of electricity and actually pave the way for using electricity and other clean end uses in a much much greater way than is used today so how do we fuel an energy transition there are only a few solutions renewables have been increasingly manufactured and put in it put into uh deployment in some countries more than others but the renewable the use of renewables is ramping up so why isn't that enough the issue is that they are intermittent um and they are in other words you know the sun only shines part of the time the window lay blows part of the time but also much more importantly they are a low power density because in effect they are renewables are coming from fusion they are coming from solar energy but at a distance of you know the distance between earth and the sun and and so automatically the diffuseness of that means that there will be limitations for how we use renewables to power industry or mega cities or other highly intensive energy energy uses fission nuclear fission which is really all of the nuclear power plants that are out there today more than 400 globally they have issues associated with national policies associated with safety concerns associated with waste disposal and not to go into that too much but fusion while it is also a nuclear reaction hydrogen fusion has inherent advantages that we're going to talk about that make it a very promising solution as an alternative so what are those advantages first of all fusion has the capability unlike renewables to be base load power it is not intermittent as we envision it in a in a magnetic fusion device we'll talk about each and the machines that will follow but fusion has the advantage of actually being a versatile replacement for fossil fuels available all the time day or night and and able to supply that intensity of energy that you need for your larger loads it is carbon free meaning that it does not release carbon or co2 or any other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere the fuel for fusion is abundant there are two key characteristics of that one is that um we we have uh you'll you'll hear in a moment we talk about two forms of hydrogen deuterium and tritium deuterium is found in seawater which means it is largely available to really all the countries of the world and tritium is bread we envision breeding it from lithiums and lithium is also readily available in the earth's crust so the idea is that if we can master fusion we really have uh fuel for tens of millions maybe hundreds of millions of years well well into the into the future of planet earth fusion is safe uh whereas fission consists of a chain reaction which if it's too high creates a runaway if it's not high enough it doesn't work fusion fission has to be maintained at just that critical element of a chain reaction with a buildup of heat that if you lose the power to take away the heat you can end up with a chernobyl or a three mile island fukushima so fusion does not have that characteristic fusion is inherently safe it's very hard to do but if any element of the fusion reaction is interrupted it simply stops it shuts down there's no decay heat there is no possibility of a meltdown the only type of accident you could have would be much much more minor nothing that would require evacuation and the inventory of of uh of radionuclides in terms of what would be released is very uniform it's tritium um so fusion has that advantage it also has the advantage of being economic in a couple of ways when it comes to the actual cents per kilowatt hour that's usually how we compare different types of energy sources in that sense we envision it being similar to uh nuclear fission plants where there will be a large capital outlay followed by negligible fuel costs in the case of fusion and and very little relatively low operating costs however there's another aspect of economics two aspects of economics that are not always talked about one is that when you when you go to when you consider the waste issue as opposed to fission nuclear fission which has tens of thousands of years of nuclear waste to be managed stored etc in in long-lived highly radioactive waste fusion will not have that the diffusion waste while you have some tritiated waste from the tritium used in essence the the fusion radioactive products are simply the activation of the metal itself that surrounds and that will be relatively short-lived if you look at an envisioned strategy yes you will decommission a fusion plant but if you let it stand in place and do nothing with it it would decay to be relatively non-radioactive in a little more than 100 years so that is an enormous advantage of fusion the other feature of economics again seldom considered is when you think about how much have we have we put as waste into the atmosphere from our fossil fuels we don't talk very much about the waste from fossil fuels but in that case the waste comparison is really stark because that's what is impacting our planet and finally still on economics is that you can consider what we have spent what the nations of the world have spent over the last 10 years or 20 years or a hundred years to position themselves for access to fossil fuels think of the armed conflicts think of the alliances that have been driven by trying to to ensure that my country or my allies have access to petroleum resources so from that standpoint the economics of fusion in which the fuel is readily available for any nation on the planet that in an economic sense says that fusion has really considerable advantage advantages so fusion in the universe we won't get into too much um uh plasma physics here but but fusion is why you're here fusion is why you live fusion is the reason for all um of life for all heat and light on earth fusion is the power at the center of the of the sun and stars where um at their center at the center of our sun for example with a a size a an overall volume is a gigantic bubble of hydrogen the the size of the sun is about 300 times that the mass is about 300 000 times that of earth so at the center of the sun the hydrogen the fusion that is going on the hydrogen is about 70 times the density of steel so these particles which would naturally both be positively charged and push apart from each other will actually be forced by gravitation so that's how fusion works in the universe like fission it involves the famous einstein e with mc squared equation in the sense that a tiny bit of of matter is converted to a massive amount of energy but in fact the fusion reaction is even more powerful more powerful than fission so how do we do that on earth where we cannot do the same thing that is replicated in the sun we don't have that gravitation we cannot fake gravitation by building it into a small uh you know a a device that would say be big enough to power a city into a fusion plant so how do we do that you see in the reaction here that we take these two two elements of hydrogen two two isotopes of hydrogen if you if you see the uh the orange balls those represent a proton normally hydrogen is just a proton but when you add a neutron the gray ball it becomes deuterium that's the far piece and when you add uh two that becomes tritium and you you may not know these units but seven mega electron volts is their entering energy this is what we get them to in the fusion reaction and you see that following the fusion reaction you get two products one is essentially helium that's a helium nucleus it's non-radioactive but if you see the units it's five times more powerful than the incoming value so you have that's where you've gained the energy in addition you look at the neutron that is produced it's 14.1 mega electron volts to compare if you release that neutron in free space it would reach the moon in eight or nine seconds that is how insanely powerful that neutron is so the neutron will collide with the metal walls of the of the fusion uh vessel of the tokamak the fusion vacuum vessel and like a bullet hitting a metal wall if you if you would feel that the bullet would fuse and you would feel heat that's essentially what the neutron does it transfers its kinetic energy to the wall as heat and the water circulating behind will then be able to uh to make steam and in a commercial plant to drive electricity so that's deuterium and tritium that become helium plus energy in the form of the energetic neutron what it requires to do this on earth is that we have a very very precise magnetic field and i'll describe that in a little bit but to get to these energies we are actually going to you'll see 150 million degrees celsius the the outcome is what we call a burning plasma that is the goal of each of you he'll be hear me talk about it in a minute but to look at the particles here if you see the helium nucleus that has all that energy that energy can still bang into the other particles it can still energize the plasma transfer its energy to the plasma and continue to the point where the plasma if you have enough of these reactions the plasma becomes burning or self-heating and that um that is what we're trying to do with the size of the eater uh the eta reactor but before i get into the details of eater let me talk about where it came from so this story is fairly famous you may have heard it but if not in november of 1985 you see those gentlemen reagan and gorbachev that was the geneva summit where actually they were focusing on how do we reduce our weapons arsenals our nuclear weapons arsenals but they wanted in addition an initiative for peace and this is where eger came up with as something that would be a a benefit for the benefit of all humankind so quite rapidly after this this was at the time of the soviet union still but it started with the us and the soviet union japan and europe joined quite quickly thereafter and it went through a decade and a half of design of engineering design conceptual design engineering design in different locations eventually in the early 2000s the question came where will this be cited where will it be located and the decision was uh was eventually reached to to place it here in france where the eater project is today but with the participation of all the members and of course everybody would have liked to have had every member would have liked to have had this this uh location with the eater project on their soil and in fact by this time in the early 2000s you had korea joining you had china joining in 2005 india joining and so by november 2006 there you have the photograph of jacques shirak at the at the elysee palace and um that was really the signing of the eater agreement by august 2010 you see uh there at the at the bottom left you have the the fields being cleared and today this is the eater site as we see it we're going to take you inside some of those buildings to see what it was how it's really come to fruition but the key here is that this is really a generational challenge why because what we today as adults have inherited from the previous generations and from our own consumption of energy using fossil fuels is a very negative legacy to pass on to our children so all of these countries and you can see that the names here china eu india we talk sometimes you see headlines about trade wars or about other disagreements even border disputes many things that go on between these countries they're the most powerful countries in in the world and yet they are all united here working side by side hand in hand in a common cause why because our generational challenge is to leave a better energy legacy to our children and uh and their children and the generations that follow so how's eater going to do that we can describe the inter the eater mission in three ways one is the phrase that you will sometimes see on our website and so forth eater is designed to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion power for peaceful purposes at industrial scale to show that it can be done at size there have been hundreds of tokamaks built that are smaller this is the first that will be at the scale that is industrial scale so we'll talk about why that's so important to all of these countries the second one i mentioned is the burning plasma or self-sustaining plasma and to do that we we can reduce the intermission to a single a single letter q q is the ratio of the output power the thermal power generated by the fusion action in the plasma versus the heating power that comes in why is that important because it is a different plasma physics phenomena nobody has ever been able to study a burning plasma unless you can count the microseconds of of you know in an h-bomb or the or being able to study remotely somehow inside a sun inside a star so eater as an experimental device is intended to allow scientists to study that that burning plasma for that we have selected a design that was that is a q of greater than or equal to 10 in pulses or a steady state that would be greater than or equal to 5. why did we select that we could have gone bigger but since eacher is designed as an experimental device which will go up and go down in power there would be no point in designing a bigger facility in fact it's possible that over time with stronger magnets with other things we will be able to construct smaller machines we'll see how that goes that's still in the future however the queue that we selected would guarantee that we would have a burning plasma and be able to study that phenomenon that is why all of these countries are coming together and putting their resources into building the ether device so a little more about the engineering of how this all works it's a series of steps and we've got them all here so you put the deuterium tritium gas into this circular donut shaped uh device called a tokamak you then inject an electric current the electric current just like the electric current in a fluorescent bulb that you might see in lighting it creates it changes the gas which we think of as the third state of matter solid liquid gas to the fourth state of matter which is plasma what does that mean it means that the molecules separate and ionize so the nucleus separates from the electrons so everything inside there is charged except of course neutrons that will be produced by fusion so that's the first step then you continue heating with electromagnetic waves and in fact the electromagnetic wave is very much like the energy that you have in your home microwave microwave except more of them and of course thousands of times more powerful the final heating system is uh what we call the the neutral beam hitting system heating system it's high energy neutral particles that can bombard the particles in the plasma and so these three heating devices may or may not be used in the eventual design of a of the commercial fusion machines but ether allows us to test all three and to combine these techniques to reach 150 million degrees 10 times hotter than the core of the sun because in this magnetic fusion device this is the temperature required for those particles to meet and collide so clearly at that extraordinary temperature no material on earth can withstand that temperature so that is why we are creating this magnetic cage inside the the steel cage of the of the vacuum vessel precisely shaped like the steel cage of the vessel but in a way that will contain and shape the plasma so this magnetic cage is made up of three main magnet systems the first one that you see which is the the central column there is called the central solenoid that uh that device and for scale you can see the human at the very very bottom do you see that this human is standing there so this is about uh 18 meters tall if you include all of the all of the structure about 13 meters uh height of magnets made in six modules the first one just shipped i'll show you a photograph later just shipped from san diego that's being made in the u.s then we have these d-shaped magnets which you see here in gold the d-shaped magnets those are being made about half in japan about half in europe and then you have round magnets since this is a cutaway it's more difficult to see but those are the the dark red magnets starting all the way at the bottom one made in in china pf6 then the next one is pf5 pf uh uh three four and three here at this level and then pf uh two and at the very top being made in st petersburg pf1 so by the combination of these ring-shaped circular magnets the d-shaped toroidal magnets and the central solenoid plus we don't usually show these but they're also smaller correction coils so when i say small the correction coils are on the order of about 10 tons uh sometimes a little bit larger than that whereas these toroidal field and colloidal field magnets are ranging in several hundred tons of piece and the central solenoid will be about a thousand tons in total with its with its structures so in combination that is how we are making this precise magnetic field now i want to talk about the size of eater i hinted at this earlier why would we build eater at this size and not larger not smaller i said it was because of q but q depends on three things not just size it depends on magnetic field strength it depends on plasma density and it depends on plasma volume so the three tokamax that you have here uh first all the way on the on the left there you see you see taurus supra yes so torah supra is the is uh now called west it's quite close to us actually this is a french tokamak um and then you see jet jet is the largest uh tokamak that has been made so far but if you look at these units at the bottom normally i'm not including this much detail but this is an important point if you look at the units at the bottom you see the volume of the jet plasma see there is 80 cubic meters whereas the volume of the ether plasma is a little bit more than 10 times more that size is going to make a huge difference how look at the heating that went into jet 23 megawatts and what did they get out 16. that's still getting not a net energy across the plasma you're still getting less energy out than energy in a q of 10 means that we're going to put 500 you see here 500 megawatts of of uh heating for a sorry 50 megawatts of heating for 500 megawatts of fusion power to come from eater so that's why size matters now if you increase the magnetic field strength yeah then you could also manipulate that ratio and there are new magnets on that i'll talk about uh later in the in the in the introduction new magnets that are out that are that are also not yet scaled up but it's possible that you would have stronger magnets which could influence the physical size of the device while still getting a higher output power however that would have other influences because of course if you contain all of this flux that we have uh the the the neutrons that hit the walls and you have it even more intensely then your materials for your walls of the tokamak have to be even uh more capable of withstanding uh the neutron flux than those that we will use for eter one other thing that i did not mention earlier we talked about differences in nuclear nuclear fission and nuclear fusion for those of you who know nuclear fission and the fuel that goes in there you have you have uh several hundred tons of fuel in there uranium and plutonium something very heavy we talked about hydrogen being light but here's the remarkable thing in this gigantic machine where the vacuum vessel has this enormous enormous diameter we're only going to put two to three grams of hydrogen deuterium and tritium in as fuel at any one time so this is again something that says when you wonder how do we have all of this hundreds of millions of years of abundant fuel that's why because fusion uses a tiny tiny amount of fuel so let's move on from the from the discussion of how eater works and talk first about how we are building it this next part will be about project management a bit how is the project managed and then we'll go on to look at some photographs of where we actually are today in june 2021. so i mentioned that all the members probably would have loved to have had the eater uh uh site on their uh the eater plant built on their on their land because their obvious economic advantages what when the decision was made and the eater agreement was was designed what members agreed on is that they would not simply send money to france or to europe as the host member but they would in fact provide in-kind contributions what does that mean components physical components right and that each of these seven members would have a domestic agency to manage the companies in the industry that would supply these components the central organization each organization manages here in cataract and and we manage the integration of all those components and the assembly and of course a key point um members will share are bound by the ether agreement to share all of the intellectual property that is generated by the project but this makes a very very unique formula you've got seven each members and because of europe really you're talking about 35 countries building one machine and europe because it's the host is responsible for 45 percent all the rest each of the non-european members are responsible for about nine percent of these procurement packages and what i've done here with this graph is to show you a relatively crude breakdown of how all that is you'll you'll see some of these components being built but the question is is that smart or is that awful what was that a very smart way to build a machine the answer is more subtle than you might think of course it means that project management at each or has to be incredibly incredibly on tuned how you manage a schedule how you integrate that schedule all of these devices coming together have to have incredible precision in other words the machine that is built must be incredibly precise why because no matter how large you build a tokamak the size of the particles the magnetic particles that you are trying to contain don't change so the weave must be like the weave of your of your your cotton or or wool uh the weave of a jacket or a shirt or something a blanket the weave must be ultra precise so that the neutrons are the only thing that escapes it has to be able to hold in with a magnetic field all the other particles in order to be efficient so doing that in a way that has all of these countries and their companies supplying this device and making it all fit together is what makes ether probably the most complex human endeavor engineering endeavor of all time is it good or is it bad there are real advantages to doing that this way and i hope that i can point some of those out as we go through the actual the actual photographs now this is just showing you a schedule i'm not imagining that you're going to be able to follow all of this schedule but what you'll see essentially is that where we are here in the middle of 2021 is the the at the point when a lot of the components are arriving more will be arriving in 2022 2023 and then we will be putting these things all together the current schedule says that we are uh trying to have all the system commissioning done by the end of of uh 2024 so that we can actually close the cryostat and and have a year of integrated commissioning with first plasma at the end of 2025. now we know that there are challenges to that we have uh managed to keep going during covet 19 but we know that there are technical challenges cobit 19 has slowed down our our uh production rate but it has not stopped by any means and as we talked now we're over 74 nearing 75 of what we call total construction through first plasma so that is every two months measuring about 25 000 different weighted activities all the way from design through commissioning that will help us to to see where we are so we have been making that steady progress despite cobit 19. now there's no float in the eter schedule through first plasma and so when you have delays you have to try to find mitigation measures in some way do some assembly in parallel etc but be after 2025 you see here a 10-year staged approach and the staged approach means that first plasma if we make it in december 2025 uh would be when you really test the functionality of the overall machine you don't have everything quite in there yet and you're just running a plasma with hydrogen not with deuterium tritium and that allows you to make sure that you have a functional machine after verifying that you go back to an element of assembly where you add certain pieces you you go then into pre-fusion power operations and you go through this series of stages with full fusion power envisioned in 2035 and so that is there is some float in this 10 years following the first plasma so even if we do now re-evaluate what is the the post-cobit baseline schedule we have to make some adjustments to the slide i showed you earlier uh we have every confidence that we will remain on this overall four-stage approach to fusion power operation so let's talk about making the dream a reality what does project progress really look like this is a top-down photo a little more clear than what um i uh gave you in the in the first overall photograph of the work site and as i go through this i will try to mention some of the eater members to show you what an integrated international project this really is so um in the eater switch yard here at this end many of the components uh there for the for the first part of the eater switch yard which is the steady state of the electrical network were supplied by the united states the there's also in the lower switch yard here there is this this uh the chinese supplied transformers there is electrical equipment really more than a hectare of electrical equipment supplied by others then that that part of the switch yard which is called the pulse power network has input to these two buildings that we call the power conversion buildings that will convert the incoming ac alternating current to direct current at exactly the right amperage that it can power the ether magnets there's also cryogenic fluid through liquid helium flowing through the magnets because the magnets have to be superconducting and to do that they have to be at minus 269 degrees so in the tokamak you've got 150 million degrees the hottest point in the universe inside the magnets that are just that are that are containing the the uh plasma you have from the aquarium plant about four degrees from absolute zero the hottest you know the temperature of interstellar space so those systems are vital to making this all work now you've also got some manufacturing facilities here the pf coils facility um this is to manufacture the colloidal field magnets that are too large to travel by road and then the cryostat workshop the only uh the only building on the worksite that is owned by india because india is making the overall thermos that will encase the cryostat that will encase the overall tokamak it's being made in four large pieces two of them i'll show you later have already been installed here in the tokemak pit one of them all the way at the top there's the upper cylinder that one has uh is is finished but but still um still in manufa still in storage waiting for its turn to be installed and in the crowdstep workshop today india is is still putting together the final piece which will be the lid the cryostat lid that goes on goes over everything all of the components from from all the eater members arrive on the work site by that road that you can see at the far they come on in they're stored in some of the temporary storage buildings eventually when it's their time they go through this cleaning building at the back and then they go into the assembly hall we'll talk about the assembly hall and all that works the cranes pick up the equipment carried into the tokamak uh building and deposit it directly into the tokamak pit and at the far you can also see there is the radio frequency building with two of the heating systems that will be ready for first plasma down here another uh heating system the neutral beam power supply is being built to full scale now in italy and it will eventually come after first plasma as the third of eater's heating systems then if you have heat if you're manufacturing all this heat and manufacturing with fusion you have to have a place for that heat to go in a commercial plant that would be the turbine generator right which would which would convert the steam to electricity eater will not make electricity but eater will have this essentially giant heat exchanger the heat rejection system capable of taking far more heat than eater is actually designed to to uh to generate and the heating system then will make sure that any water before it is returned uh we get our water from the canal up above this hill and before its return to the canal that there is no temperature differential the other building that i would mention is simply the the control building at the far left there that is still in preparation i've talked about the tokamak building but the tokamak building that you can see here is actually three buildings in one here you have the diagnostics building then the tokamak building and then on the far side the tritium building which will not be ready for first plasma but i'll show you a photograph work is resumed on that uh tritium building is is one of those and on together the diagnostics building the tokamak building and the tritium building comprise the overall tokamak complex so what have we been doing recently much of this now is just from about the past year maybe a little bit more where we have been doing uh installation the first component which to be installed in the major component to be installed in the tokamak pit is the cryostat base and you see that right here this is the bottom of that thermos that i said india was putting together so that 1250 tons picked up by the over these overhead cranes and transported across so that it can be deposited in the tokamak building in the tokamak kit now that might seem simple but here's something to remember this is the top down view as it was installed in the in the pit that cryostat base now on the top down view is 30 meters in diameter okay so immense 1250 tons and yet the precision with which it had to uh be stationed in its final position was under three millimeters at every one of the metrology points why is that important talk to an engineer and they'll tell you that that sort of engineering is unbelievable so what we are doing at each or yes our goal ultimately is fusion power demonstrating that fusion can be done at industrial scale but for any type of magnetic fusion device globally for any project going on for any national project for any fusion roadmap that any country has eter is providing value by proving that fusion engineering can be done at full scale the next component the cryostat lower cylinder so again this is the thermostat and this is this is a a essentially just a circle of metal but an incredibly precise circle of metal again 30 meters in diameter the same as the base 10 meters high that essentially means that this component was about the size of the the uh prehistoric monument at stonehenge yeah the ring the ring at stonehenge if that gives you perspective and again that was lowered in um in just a few months after the cryostat base in january we lowered another component which we sometimes talk about as the jewel there are multiples of these the this is a very very shiny component made by korea it's a um the thermal shield comes in two types this type is is uh uh insulating the thermostat from the the cryostat from the um from the interior of the tokamak and um it's a so it's just it's metal but with a silver plating that helps it to be ultra reflective i'll tell you about another one a bit later but we don't always talk a lot about eater innovation and here's a good example where korea is using the insights they're making the thermal shields they're using the insights that they took from manufacturing the thermal shield to improve shipping containers for liquefied natural gas which again have a similar parameter which is you want to keep the cold in and the heat out and their experience in working on each or help them with perfecting that now on the top picture on this one you see us getting ready to install eacher's magnets this was early 2021 several months ago actually most of the welding was was finished even in the last few months of 2020 but this is where the the welding uh had to be completed where we're putting the first two components together the lower cylinder to the cryostat base so really about 90 meters of welding done partly by humans and partly by robots the first magnet was installed in april this is colloidal field coil number six and you know you're going to see another photo of this later so remember pf6 pf6 doesn't look so big here right because it looks like it's kind of small you know sticking into this but that's it that that meter is 10 sorry that magnet is 10 meters in diameter it's huge it's incredibly weighty it was procured by europe but europe procured it in china because they were doing many pf6 magnet or multiple pf6 magnets at the same time so there you see pf6 as the first magnet installed in the pip now we talk about vacuum vessels the vacuum vessel in eacher is like the sections of an orange if you think about how you cut an orange into sections each of the intersections is 40 degrees in total making up uh 360 degrees and there you see on the on the top left the the vacuum vessel sector number six the first one to arrive with on the back you can see that there are these uh there are these parts of it that are sticking out in the back that is the port plug supplied by russia and then to make an overall sub-assembly you need two other things you need toroidal field coils supplied by japan and italy in this case you see tf-12 in a tool specially made by korea which would be able to up end the magnets so it can be placed onto the giant assembly tool with it with the vacuum vessel and there's another piece which is this thermal shield now remember i said it was silver coated the thermal shield that was round that you saw earlier is providing insulation inside the cryostat this is another layer that goes directly around conformed precisely to the vacuum vessel sector here you can see that a piece has been added on to the first this is the same uh vacuum vessel sector but a bottom-up view so then you have the cryogenics plant and system there are a bunch we talk a lot about the tokamak and what goes inside but across the eater's site you have a lot of engineering going on that is of incredible precision also in order to make the overall system work so the cryogenics plant and system is both a physical facility we will be circulating about 25 000 tons of liquid helium using this plus quite a large volume of liquid nitrogen as well for some of the other cooling components and that requires not only the central plant which kind of looks like if you open the back of your refrigerator tanks compressors valves uh pumps etc and it also involves the lines so all of these cryostat lines have to be precisely maneuvered all the way through from this plant into the tokamak complex uh a note on global progress that i said i would refer to i mentioned it slightly earlier there's a lot of r d going on on what we call high temperature super conducting magnets so those would be magnets that would only need to be cooled to about minus 70 degrees a little colder than your in your refrigerator or freezer but still it would not require this gigantic cryogenic system so there is an example of where globally the the fusion research community is working on ideas that could help to further optimize the machines of the future now christian lunik who is a german photographer took this photograph of the cryogenics plant that's just a more artistic view of the plant that uh that you just saw i'll show you a couple of his photographs as we go forward electrical networks so i mentioned these already i won't go into too much detail here except to say that the photograph you see at the top right top left is actually the steady state all the way at the back that's the steady state electrical system which is converted to the french grid that's this that's powering all the ether buildings it's the normal system and then we have what we call reactive power compensation and the reactive power compensation system is the pulsed power system essentially that is able to deliver a much higher amount of electricity but in a microsecond and it's not needed throughout the plasma reaction it's needed only for a burst uh at the beginning and so the overall energy used if you think not in terms of kilowatts per kilowatt hours the overall energy use is not that great because it's a microsecond but it still requires the installation of almost a hectare probably around a hectare of this specialized equipment for the false power system magnet power conversion i mentioned this next so the power that is converted from ac to dc has to power the magnets and so these these yellow bars these giant bars that you see go all the way through this building these buildings and also inside the tokamak complex where they uh these bus bars supplied by russia carried the the electricity dc direct current at the amperage and voltage needed for the magnets so both inside these buildings and in the bays that are on the outside we have components from china india korea and russia that are all coming together to make the magnet power conversion and i could have made this point here in orange in several of the slides but i would mention it here one of the other benefits of the eater project is we are in fact creating a worldwide network of companies that have experience in meeting these insanely demanding requirements for fusion engineering important point important contribution of the project here another photo by christian lunig showing you a more artistic version of the uh manu uh magnet power conversion building on the inside now here we have the heat rejection system i mentioned this already uh basically that that large building at the far left is is just it's it's a giant heat exchanger but then it is also there's a network of piping and so forth that is able to take away uh well more than the 500 megawatts of heat thermal power that is eater's design plus ether is scaled to maybe go up to 750 megawatts for future experiments so we have with 1.2 gigawatts more than enough capacity this gives you a christian lunatic view of that piping system again an artistic rendition and on the top of that heat exchanger building almost an oil painting but this is actually a photograph showing the indian supplied fans at the top of the at the top of the building also inside there are the cooling basins which provide the gigantic capacity that i was just talking about the removal of all of this heat for the uh for from the from the eater tokamak delivery delivery is quite important remember i said that that little magnet quote pf6 doesn't look very big when you see it being installed but on the photograph at the top right you can see that in fact pf6 at 10 meters is a huge huge load to come up the eater itinerary all the components arrive in marseille at the harbor and then they have 104 kilometers to travel all the way up to eater and we're shutting down the road at night in order to make that happen in fact a couple of years ago in the summer when we saw that this component was going to not ship on an angle but shipped flat we moved uh we actually asked the local authorities and they removed a little bit more of the cliff to allow passage of this component so yet another contribution of the eater project is understanding the complex logistics that are designed to deliver these massive very very high precision components that are very temperature sensitive from three different continents and that has proven reliable even during cobit 19. why is that important because to be honest while many countries are looking at doing their own demo plants when you're doing them an industrial scale there still is no country on earth who could do all of this work by itself so the ability to create that global logistics supply the global supply chain and the logistics for how to deliver things is is quite an important contribution on-site fabrication um we've been as i said making the coils that are too large uh to to to be shipped uh making them here now the one at the top is the one you've seen twice before this is pf6 but this is pf6 after it arrived and after we took off the packaging and did the cold testing and then these two which are large that was 10 meters i know it looks larger in the photo but this one here pf5 after it was done is uh 17 meters and just to show the contrast we temporarily after it was finished put it inside one of the quote quote pancakes the flat layers of pf4 which is 24 meters so these are the ones that are being manufactured by europe on-site now india is also doing some on-site fabrication as i mentioned earlier here you're able to see the components of the cryostat lid which are uh as they arrived and as they were stored there in the hall they're arriving from india and then they all have to be put together and welded here why is that important well it's a great great example of multinational cooperation these things are forged these pieces are forged in hazira they're being welded together on the eater site by german experts german welding experts under indian supervision and french nuclear regulation on an international site and that's just a microcosm of how etcher really works here you see the actual welding starting to give you perspective of how big that is as these pieces of the cryostat lid are fabricated together there's lots more manufacturing ongoing globally we're at about 85 percent of all ethers manufacturing being done this is not by any list an exhaustive list of the components that i'm going to give you for each of the countries but it will give you an example so in europe the europe as i as i mentioned japan and europe are making the tf coils so there are some of the european tf coils being made we mentioned that korea had sent a vacuum vessel europe is also uh one along in completing the back of five of the nine back in vessel sectors which right now are about 67 to 89 uh complete and that also with the humans standing in the middle shows you the massive size of these uh precise components russia to give you an example is working on that top magnet similar in size a little lighter than the the one that was uh shipped by china this is pf1 in very late stages of fabrication uh just actually earlier uh this month japan celebrated the completion of uh the number five coil which was made by toshiba mitsubishi had been making the others and japan has four more of these toroidal field coils in manufacturing i mentioned i showed you the art photo of this piece actually installed the the cooling tower fan uh manufactured by india india it's actually manufactured quite a lot of the cooling water system components and on the vacuum vessel sector again here you see a view of where korea has welded these russian-made plugs onto the outside of its vacuum vessel sector the second sector and is about to put this sort of shipping house over top that is now actually on its way to to eater china is delivering a lot of the feeders which are actually tokemak building components that do the final delivery of the electricity and the heating uh sorry the cooling uh the cryogenic cooling for the magnets um so lots and lots of that arriving they're in series production now they've already delivered quite a lot of it and uh just earlier this month the united states shipped the first of two completed modules there are seven modules overall for the central solenoid six to be installed plus a spare and they have completed the first two the others are in advanced manufacturing and this one is actually now as i speak on its way between san diego and houston where at the port of houston it will be shipped to to marseille to become the first central solenoid module here at eger now i'm about to close but i want to mention other fusion projects going on because sometimes we get questions about that first of all there are other ways to do fusion there is inertial confusion which is initial not inertial confusion inertial fusion that was a slip inertial fusion is is something that uses lasers to produce a very concentrated burst of fusion at a defined point there is a combination project that that's kind of a mix between magnetic confinement fusion and inertial fusion that's being done by by general fusion which just announced they're going to build a plant in the uk they're in the world of of magnetic confinement fusion you have generally tokamax and stellarators ether is a tokamak and the tokamak has the most research uh of any of these models that's why any of these approaches that's why it's been so heavily researched that's why eater is a tokamak because it represents probably the most reliable well-studied way to producing commercial fusion the largest fusion plant i mentioned before you saw an illustration of it is jet there is a an mit spin-off that is looking at uh for the massachusetts institute of technology that is a private venture this is also a private venture tokamak energy in the united kingdom these are uh private projects and people always ask are they going to make you obsolete are they going to go faster than each other and the answer is sure private in private investment private initiatives don't have some of the restrictions that public the public funding does if you look at procedural things but from a physics perspective they've got the same challenges that we do and it is not it can be for if you're a private investor it can be a competition but we don't view this as a competition we are all working globally private sector now entering the race which is a fabulous sign saying we're getting closer we are all working tilling to exactly the same goal to try to address this generational issue that i mentioned at the at the beginning the need for massive carbon-free energy so from the standpoint of governments eater will be followed by demo a pilot fusion plant you've got some eater members that have announced plans or in some cases are well along toward the the conceptual design or the engineering design for their own pilot plants and as i mentioned in the previous slide private industry is beginning to invest in fusion energy initiatives so that's it thank you for your attention i give you this final photoshopped photo that shows that eater as building a star on earth is taking its place here in the in the milky way among the stars of the universe if you would like to take an extended tour of the eat your work site from just a couple of weeks ago there's a video that that will actually take you into some more detail inside the buildings that i was showing i hope that i've provided you a good introduction to the overall eater project and we invite you also to sign up for visits there's a visit the uh if you come here to to to the south of france we will do our best to introduce you physically to the eter project you get to see it at scale we also have virtual visits available we hope that you will continue to follow our project as we really seek to make a complete difference in how uh energy is produced by future generation uh in the in a way that that really makes a contribution to carbon free energy for our children and future generations thanks so much you

Channel: iterorganization

Views: 19,156

Rating: 4.9179955 out of 5

Keywords: ITER, Fusion, Fusion Energy, Fusion Power, Tokamak

Id: kDaTQSmsJC8

Length: 53min 1sec (3181 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/South_Equipment_1458]

So heres a question: if ITER works as intended, why, after spending billions of world units of currency to build a massive heat exchanger to diffuse the heat that this machine is expected to produce, do they not spend a few more million hooking this thing up to France’s power grid? I recognize that ITER is a test body, an experiment, BUT if it works the way it is intended to, why not use it to actually supply power to the energy grid? If successful it could become the first fusion power plant; if it is a total failure then only a small portion of the trillions spent would have gone into grid connection…so why not do it?

[u/meyeti]

Sorry, didn't get past "it's"

/s