Newsletter | 2003 December

• Remote Handling Simulations – Preparing for 2004 Vessel Shutdown

  The 2004 JET shutdown will be the most challenging yet for the JET remote Handling Group, involving close to 200 individual tasks, most of which are implemented remotely. It became obvious some time ago, that the way in which the remote handling operations team prepares for shutdowns had to evolve to cope [...]

• JET Publications

  In 2003, 61 contributions to journals have been submitted to the JET pinboard: 7 Physical Review Letters, 11 Nuclear Fusion, 33 Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 5 Physics of Plasma, 5 other journals. At the same time, the contributions to conferences went to a total of 220, in particular 90 contributions to [...]

• Extension of EFDA to 2005

  The principle of the extension of EFDA up to 31 December 2005 has been approved by the Consultative Committee for the Euratom Fusion Research (CCE-FU) at its meeting held in Brussels on 22 October 2003. This includes the collective use of the JET facilities until the 31 December 2005. The corresponding amendments [...]

• The Hybrid Scenario in JET: A promising route for ITER with Q = 10

  In 2003 the JET Task Force S2 started the detail studies of a new plasma regime, now known as “the ITER hybrid scenario”. In these plasmas, the central value of safety factor q is kept just above one with very low magnetic shear – a “hybrid” between the standard sawtoothing H-modes q [...]

• Close Support Unit in Culham

  Alain Lioure, the new Head of Enhancement Department joined the Close Support Unit in Culham in August. In the same Department two new Responsible Officers,  Friederic Le Guern (from CEA) and Juergen Gafert (from IPP) arrived in September.

• ITER Siting

  The ITER site may be chosen at the very time when this Bulletin is being printed, with a key meeting to be held at Washington on 19-20 December. This is an exciting time for all of us working in fusion. The tension started mounting in Europe just a few weeks ago, on [...]

• Neutral Beam power upgrade brings key ITER plasma parameters closer to JET’s reach

  The enhancement of the Octant 8 Neutral Injector Box (NIB) on JET is a major project that started in 2000 with the aim of providing a substantial increase in power delivered to the plasma. JET’s large size together with its high plasma current capability (≈4.5MA) and magnetic field (up to 4T) provide the ability to [...]

• JET and DIII-D Joint experiments on β scaling

  Joint experiments on DIII-D (General Atomics, San Diego, California) and JET have obtained a result that indicates that ITER might perform better than the baseline design assumption. The experiments have measured the dependence of the energy confinement on βN , the normalised ratio of the plasma’s kinetic and magnetic pressures. They were [...]

• Interview with Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith FRS

  Keep JET Operating You have moved from a field (particle physics) in which the programme is driven by scientific curiosity. Should fusion be mainly science driven or mission oriented? Fusion research must be primarily and increasingly focussed on producing an economically viable fusion power plant as soon as possible. At Culham we are studying [...]

• JET Events

  August 18 Successful restart of JET after 3 months of planned maintenance; High Power campaign C10 starts August 18 The new French High Commisionner for Atomic Energy, Mr Bernard Bigot, visited JET accompanied by Dr. Jean Jacquinot, Head of Association EURATOM-CEA and Mr. Jean-Paul Watteau, Science Advisor to the High [...]

• Family Day Children’s Competition

  The Family and Friends Day in the Culham Science Centre on Saturday September 6th  was a big success, with about 1500 visitors attending. To get feedback from the younger generation (that will hopefully move fusion from experiments to real life), we asked children to write down a story or to draw us [...]

• JET Public Website

  This September, a revamped version of the JET public website, http://www.jet.efda.org  was released. Its design was developed in close collaboration between the JET webmaster, Publications office and Graphics group. The website features a new major section called “Focus On” – regularly issued articles, which are simple in vocabulary and rich in illustration, and [...]

• Putting the “T” back in JET

  JET successfully completes the Trace Tritium Experiments On 1st November, the JET ‘Trace Tritium Experiments ’ (TTE) Campaign was brought to a successful conclusion. This Campaign marked the first use of tritium in JET Plasmas since the Deuterium Tritium Experiment No 1 (DTE1) Campaign in 1997, and the first use of tritium in [...]

• EIROforum

  The EIROforum, a co-operation between seven European Intergovernmental Research Organisations , which began three years ago as an informal discussion forum, is now becoming a major player in developments of the European Research Area. EFDA JET, as one of its members, is playing a key role in this process since Dr Jérôme [...]

• International Collaborations

  Successful start of collaborative activities with the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China EFDA-JET has long-standing collaborations with scientists from the US and Japan and during 2003 added the Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China to its list of international collaboration partners. Twelve Russian scientists visited EFDA-JET between 15 [...]