Abstract
The first stage of nuclear fusion research closed with the big tokamaks, the American TFTR, European JET and Japanese JT-60, that came online in the 1990s. Their design and construction is discussed. TFTR and JET have so far been the only tokamaks that ran experiments with deuterium-tritium plasmas and the only ones that have produced any fusion power to speak of. None of these tokamaks achieved ignition, nor the minimal quantitative challenge of scientific breakeven. JET has come closest with a value of 0.67 compared to 1 for scientific breakeven. A special section is devoted to the misleading definition and use of the term breakeven in fusion research.
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Notes
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Hirsch had used a deuterium-tritium mix in his work at International Telephone and Telegraph.
- 2.
Energetic plasma ions diffuse outwards towards the walls and bombard the walls and other structures of the vessel. This releases heavy atoms from the wall material into the plasma and pollutes it.
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1 MJ is not a great deal of energy; a 100-watt lightbulb will burn it away in less than 3 h (1 kWh = 3.6 MJ).
- 4.
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199508/letters.cfm, accessed 2 June 2020. There are plenty of other instances where such misleading statements have been made by leading members of the fusion community, which is very regrettable, if not outright dishonest. The website of New Energy Times has exposed several of such statements in respect of ITER.
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It is a sly way to present the result in this way: “enough to power 3000 homes for a few seconds”; the use of 3000 makes it impressive, as 3000 is a fairly big number, but it is actually the same as “enough to power a single home for just a few hours”, which will not impress anybody.
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A condition for stability is q > 1 everywhere; in practice q at the edge of a large aspect ratio (R/a » 1) plasma should be 3 in order to fulfil this condition.
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The size of the plasma then follows from Ampère’s law, which relates the integrated magnetic field around a closed loop to the electric current passing through the loop, so here it relates the total plasma current to Bpol and the minor radius. For a given plasma current, a too small plasma gives too high Bpol and a too small safety factor.
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Nowadays the President of the European Council would have to be added to this. From 1975 to 2009 this was not a separate function but held by the head of state or government of the member state holding the semi-annually rotating presidency of the Council.
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Earlier at Aden International Airport, one of the intermediate stops, the pilot Jürgen Schumann had been killed by the terrorists.
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This can now be found in Article 187 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The members of these Joint Undertakings are typically the European Union (represented by the European Commission) and industry-led association(s), as well as other partners. Joint Undertakings adopt their own research agenda and award funding mainly on the basis of open calls for proposals.
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A bolometer is a device for measuring the power of incident electromagnetic radiation via the heating of a material with a temperature-dependent electrical resistance.
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Interferometry involves a number of techniques in which waves, usually electromagnetic waves, are superimposed, causing interference, which is used to extract information.
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Comparison is however made difficult by the fact that the European project is accounted for in the nebulous Unit of Account (UC), a basket of European currencies, in 1979 changed into the European Currency Unit (ECU) and finally in 1999 into the euro. The total construction cost is estimated to have been about 200 million ECU. The design report states a total construction cost including commissioning, buildings and staff of 135 million UC at March 1975 prices (JET Project 1976, p. 49). The 1994 JET Annual Report states that the construction phase of the project, from 1978 to 1983, was completed successfully within the scheduled period and within 8% of projected cost of 184.6 million ECU at January 1977 values.
- 16.
One of the papers I benefited from in writing this section is Keilhacker et al. 2001.
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Reinders, L.J. (2021). The Big Tokamaks: TFTR, JET, JT-60. In: The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64344-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64344-7_8
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