Fusion with TWI

14/05/2012

The words ‘amazing’ and ‘incredible’ are used freely these days, but the ITER project under construction in Southern France truly deserves that description.

ITER is constructing a ‘Tokamak-type’ experimental reactor to

create energy from nuclear fusion. This is a truly international project involving scientists and technical people from all over the world.

The facts and figures surrounding the project are impressive. The temperature at the centre of the device will be at 150 million degrees centigrade, ten times hotter than the centre of the sun, but the 80 thousand kilometres of superconducting strands forming the huge magnets to control the plasma will be at 4 K or –269ºC! The magnets themselves will operate at 13 T (the earth’s magnetic field is approximately 0.1 T). There is a fascinating overview of the project on the ITER website (www.iter.org).

The EU organisation managing Europe’s contribution to ITER, Fusion for Energy (F4E), recently turned to TWI, with its proven track record in the nuclear sector, to train its engineers in the basics of NDT so that they can understand more fully the inspections taking place during the construction.

www.twitraining.com

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