KIT Summer School Factfile

From our experience at the KIT Summer School (see the full blog post here) we compiled a list of interesting facts about FUSION that we learnt, and also facts about GERMANY.

 Fusion Factfile 

1. The TF coils in ITER will store over 40GJ of magnetic energy! That’s 15 times the kinetic energy we store in our massive flywheels at JET. 

2. I was surprised to learn that the Lorentz force generated by the maximum current planned for one of ITER’s TF coils would cause them to collapse if they were self-supported. 

3. The assembly tolerances for the ITER vessel and magnets are phenomenally tight. This will be an incredible feat of engineering when they achieve it.

4. Stellarators look freakin’ awesome 

5. The ITER toroidal field coils will contain 150,000km of superconducting strands – enough to stretch over 3 times around the circumference of the earth.   

6. Super conductivity is really clever! But making superconducting magnets seems painfully difficult. High temperature super conducting materials are going to be really important for future fusion devices. 

7. KIT have the largest tritium lab in Europe and are the only lab capable of conducting tritium research for ITER. ITER will weigh 27,000 tonnes (3 times Eifel Tower).
 

    8. Cryopumps don’t actually “pump” anything! They work by condensing all the gas molecules onto a very cold surface, which periodically has to be regenerated by heating it up  - just like your freezer! This makes long-term continuous operation a big challenge for DEMO.

9. ITER will be testing out 6 different breeder blanket concepts to see which one works best.

10. The Tore Supra tokamak has an 8-metre long ‘Articulated Inspection Arm’ which is fully integrated in the tokamak vacuum. An inspection can be done after every pulse without interrupting the vacuum! 

 

Germany/KIT Factfile

 

    1. Karlsruhe’s beautiful palace gardens are open to the public every day; for free! 

    2. If you are not used to Steins, be careful not to drink them like a pint…  

    3. There’s a free shuttle bus between KIT south and north campus, which is very convenient! 

    4. German cycle commuting is awesome! Much better infrastructure for cycling, and European style commuter cycles (rather than sport oriented cycles) are actually a lot better than I had expected – really easy for commuting with.

  

5. Mike from Mike’s Bikes: what a dude. He will rent you a bicycle for around 10 €/day. Do it. Cycling through the forest, along beautifully smooth cycle paths to and from the KIT campus is sweet. Beats the bus.  

6. Karlsruhe was dreamt up by Charles III William in 1700s during a nap – he designed the city to look like the sun radiating from the palace in the east. 

7. It’s easy to buy really good non-alcoholic wheat beer and non-alcoholic cocktails at almost all restaurants and bars. 

8. Don’t forget to ask for a receipt at the KIT canteen 

9. When you’re packing to go to the KIT summer school leave room for about 2kg of lecture notes and 2 or 3 bottles of souvenir wine. 

10. Three-course meals every night take their toll. Germany is very good at providing individual receipts. 

11. The free KIT wi-fi is also available at the Studentzentrum on the south campus (i.e. where the shuttle bus stops), and in the grounds in front of the palace in the city centre (Karlsruhe Schloss) 

12. “Europabad” is well worth a visit. 

13. Sometimes German transport isn’t on time!

KIT summer school 2014

This year 74 people new to Fusion Research went to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany for the yearly 2-week holiday…ahem... I mean Summer School on Fusion Technology. There were people there from all over Europe, but also people from as far away as India. There were 17 of us going from Culham, 10 graduates, 1 PhD student, and 6 experienced engineers/physicists (semi-) new to the field of Fusion. 

Image courtesy of KIT

It was a chance to learn some basics about plasma physics, the politics and future of fusion, technology used in the industry and other tokamaks across the world. It was also a chance for eating good food, drinking good beer and general partying (ahem…I mean networking). We had some very good lectures and tours at KIT, but I’m not going to bore you with details of everything, so I’ll just give you some highlights. 

Our first lecture of the school was CCFE’s very own David Ward, a pioneer for the role of fusion in future energy. He reminded us of the massive problems the world faces with respect to energy, and how little is being spent on new energy research.  Personally I was struck by how often people doing research into Fusion claim that too much is being spent on other renewables and not enough on Fusion, and vice versa- people doing research into solar or wind power often have the opinion that too much is being spent on Fusion. The reality seems to be that nowhere near enough money is being spent on any of it, and instead of attacking each other, we should be advertising this fact. Anyway enough of that because David has inspired a new blog post on this subject- coming soon.

All of this learning was pretty exhausting, so we decided to let off some steam by going to the local water park ‘Europabad’. There were some awesome slides, including one where you stand in a pod, press ‘go’, a countdown begins and then the floor disappears and you are *dropped* vertically down a slide. It was great. There is a random YouTube video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PqooMXBr1Q. 

Back to school: after some introductory plasma physics, we headed straight for the deep end, and got up to speed on the latest on plasma heating and diagnostics, breeder blanket designs, divertors and neutronics. In between lectures we had some great tours of the KIT site. In the first week we went to the Test Blanket Module (TBM) facilities and learned about the research they are doing for ITER. We also saw the HELOKA facility, which is designed for testing various components for nuclear fusion facilities including the ITER test blanket modules and divertor modules, and the High Flux Test Modules for IFMIF (International Fusion Material Irradiation Facility). Here are some of the Culham Engineers next to the big vacuum vessel they use.

We were staying in the Jugendherberge (Youth Hostel ) which was very close to the city centre (and the huge beautiful park). However, this meant that there was a 10km journey to the KIT north campus every day. There was a free bus which was great, but a few of us decided to make use of the amazing bicycle paths through the forest all the way to the campus and hired bikes for the duration of the school. Here is a selfie Jon C took while enjoying a nice pootle through the forest. Great idea until Germany decided to rain (pour) on us. We got soaked and Jon K got a puncture and had to walk 6km in the rain. A large Weissbier was required after that. 

At the weekend the KIT organisers had arranged for us to go on an excursion to a nice town called Speyer. I think they knew exactly what kind of people we were because after eating the biggest pretzels you’ve even seen, and looking at the nice cathedral with pretzel decorations (they like their pretzels), we went to the Technic Museum Speyer. They had a “large collection of aircraft, classic cars, locomotives and fire engines, some of the highlights are an original BURAN spaceshuttle, the largest space flight exhibition in Europe, a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet, the submarine U9, a former German Navy submarine and a gigantic Ukrainian Antonov AN-22 cargo plane.”  This, plus 70 engineering enthusiasts resulted in the most excited group of geeks you can imagine. When Jon saw the moon-rock we thought he might implode, and we had to drag Greggles out of the submarine so we could go on the slide from the Jumbo jet.  If the day wasn’t good enough already, we then we sent off to taste some wine from the Rhine valley, and had a large buffet dinner. An epic day out was had by all.

The following week we were taught about tritium handling, vacuum pumping, superconducting magnets and remote handling. We learnt about various tokamaks around the world – Tore Supra (France), JT-60SA (Japan), ASDEX (Germany), Wendelstein 7-X (stellerator, Germany) and ITER.  These were interspersed with nice sunny evenings in the park (with a 1.30 Euro beer from the student bar), some slacklining and juggling and Chinese takeaway. Not forgetting Scruffys the Irish bar which specialised in live music and Jägermeister.

Another tour around KIT gave us the opportunity to see TOSKA, where they are doing tests on scaled-down versions of the ITER superconducting magnets, the cryogenic test facility (CryoMaK) and the tritium lab. We also got to have a go on the remote handling arms, and to play with liquid nitrogen using a glove box. 

On our final day we welcomed CCFE’s Nick Balshaw and Liz Surrey who spoke to us about JET and DEMO respectively - two fantastic talks to finish the school with (unbiased of course).  We went away feeling enthused and happy and at least 5 pounds heavier.

I asked attendees to give me two facts that they took away from our experience in Germany, one about fusion and one about Germany. If you’re thinking of attending KIT next year these will be useful! Link here.

Graduate intake 2014!

It’s October (we’re all wondering where the summer went??), but this means new Graduates destined for a fun two years and great things beyond. Here is a blog piece with cheesy picture to welcome them to Culham and find out a bit more about them.

I asked them to answer some sensible as well as silly questions, and got a variety of answers especially for the favourite pudding one. I think it says a lot about a person. Here are their answers in order of appearance in the photo in front of JET...

Victor Agudo Polytechnical University of Madrid (UPM), Aeronautical Engineering specializing in jet engines.

Department : Remote Handling (ITER) 

Favourite Pudding: Cheesecake without doubt. 

If you could be an animal what would you be: I would probably go for a quokka, looks like they are pretty happy.

Hopes for the graduate scheme: Apart from a valuable professional experience, I would like to get a bunch of good friends, great times and maybe, if I cross the right gamma ray, some sort of super powers or at least a cool glowing halo.

Alex Davies, University of Surrey (Guildford), Physics. I have spent the last year working in an Indian engineering consultancy called HCL. . Before I came here I always wanted to be a teacher, and at some point in my life I think I will do that, just not yet.
Initial Department : Tritium Group, Water Detritiation System (WDS) 
Important information: Can be bribed with chocolate   

Simon Kirk University of Cambridge, MEng Mechanical Engineering, PhD Experimental Physics 
Initial Department : Central Engineering 
Favourite Pudding: Chocolate and Pear Trifle 
If you could be an animal what would you be: Sea Lion 
Hopes for the graduate scheme: Learn about all the different parts of CCFE and what they do. 
Other interests: Rowing

Samual Ha, Imperial College London, Mechanical Engineering with Nuclear. 
Department : Remote Handling 
Favourite Pudding: Brownies 
If you could be an animal what would you be: White Crane 
Hopes for the graduate scheme: I’m hoping to get experience and a good time out of the graduate programme.
Other Interests:  My interests are few and far between, generally including exploring the great outdoors and/or exercising.

Bruce Edwards, University of Bath, Masters in Aerospace Engineering. Industrial placement at Siemens Magnet Technology (MRI Magnets), Cryostat dept. 
Initial Department : Remote Handling (DEMO & JET) 
Favourite Pudding: It depends whether you mean pudding in the traditional British sense or a general dessert. As bake-off enthusiasts will know this is a non-trivial distinction. If it is the former I may be inclined to opt for steak and kidney although Yorkshire would be a close second. If the latter was the intended meaning then perhaps a decadent chocolate mousse. 
If you could be an animal what would you be A blobfish (to improve my appearance)… or a golden eagle.

 
Hopes for the graduate scheme: I hope the opportunity to get involved in a variety of projects and accumulate a good cross-section of technical skills and competencies. Variety is the spice of life. 
Other Interests: Other interests include cycling (which I enjoy boring people with), climbing, running, slacklining, ale and whisky. Also I have a homemade 3D printer (RepRap). 

Jake Stephens University of Bath, Electrical Power Engineering 

Initial Department : JET Power Supplies, Ohmic Heating 
Favourite Pudding: Easier to list those puddings which are not a favourite: “…” 

If you could be an animal what would you be: Something Canine, doesn’t really matter what, they all seem to be mostly excited about everything. Seems good to me except fireworks and thunder would apparently lose all appeal. 
Hopes for the graduate scheme: 
Twelve Drummers Drumming
Eleven Pipers Piping...
Actually to finish it with the same smile as this guy

knowing there are some awesome people and possibilities ahead.

James Andrews The University of Manchester, BEng Mechatronic Engineering 
Initial Department : Remote Handling 
Favourite Pudding: Banoffee or carrot cake 
If you could be an animal what would you be: Dolphin 
Hopes for the graduate scheme: Learn lots about engineering and science and contribute towards providing sustainable energy for our future as a race.

Here is a sensible photo of them in front of JET (in case you genuinely want to see what they look like!)