Thank you very much, John. It's delightful to be here. I was an undergraduate at Oxford and I was sort of a weakness when I come into this lecture
theatres and some wonderful memories of my Aitchison lectures on quantum mechanics.
If any of you had those. They were spectacular. Lots of other wonderful times.
I mean, what? We had two feet, plasma started, plasma unleashed.
And now I'm supposed to talk about plasma obtained.
I'll talk a little bit about where we are, what is the current status, where we expect to be, and some of the exciting things that are happening.
Because I'm very excited about the relationship with Oxford because as you can see,
we have some very bright young theoreticians who are making a big dent,
not just in explaining what's happening, but in proposing ways in which we might be able to reduce the cost and scale of fusion.
And I think if you ask me, are we going to have fusion power?
I'll be bold here, which is that I think fusion is possible.
I think where we are with Jet and where we will go with ITER will demonstrate that you can actually have a self-sustained fusion burn in a device.
What I don't know is whether we can do it at a cost that you want to pay for your electricity,
and that requires some innovation and some steps forward that require both innovation in technology,
innovation in engineering, and innovation in the science.
So we talk about that and how it relates to what we've already had this morning.
I won't give you my normal hard sell on why we should do fusion energy.
Most of you probably got it 30 years ago. You also will know the joke.
I don't think I have to repeat the joke because you know it so well.
So anyway, so my basic thing is I'll talk about what the current plan for the first electricity in fusion is
that electricity will be expensive electricity and it will not demonstrate the cost effectiveness.
I'll talk about what Aether will do, which is the machine we're building in southern France.
You saw a picture of it. It's very large and some of the challenges there.
And then I'll talk about what we're trying to do to make fusion perhaps cheaper, faster, more effective.
One of the problems that you have in developing a technology in which every step is going to cost you $10 billion,
euros, pounds, whatever is, how many steps can you actually make?
A lot of innovation happens in that Edison ion way in which you build something.
It's not quite right. You tweak it, you build something else, etc. And you can't do that on the 10 billion scale.
So a lot has to be driven by theory and very precise understanding of what the next step will actually be.
Some. The 30 year rule about fusion.
I can make it worse than that. We can go back to what it really all started.
I mean, we can go back all the way to Eddington in 1920 saying that the fusion must be happening in the middle of the sun.
But we've come a bit forward from that. When people started to think about whether you could actually use fusion as a power source.
And there's a nice piece of history here.
So during the the bomb project in the Second World War, of course, they were thinking a little bit about fusion.
And famously, Edward Teller, of course, was not doing his job. He was working on the atom bomb, he was working on the H-bomb.
And people kept getting frustrated with him.
But part of that was thinking about they started thinking about whether you could control the fusion reaction and how you can find it.
And when I was I was an undergraduate here, and then I went and did my Ph.D. in Princeton.
And there was always stories around Princeton that Fermi had given a lecture on how to make a fusion reactor with magnetic confinement,
and he gave it at a famous dream of happy conference that they had at Los Alamos in 1946.
It's a classified conference. At this conference,
they decide all the big names who were going back to their universities decided
we should have a conference and everybody should give a talk about what they
think is going to happen in the future and the issues that the US government
should look at scientifically and what kind of new ideas need to be worked on.
And there should be no notes from this conference because a lot of it was highly classified anyway.
And we'll just talk now. Indeed, there are no notes from this conference because if you go to Los Alamos,
some friends of mine who have access to all the classified files in in Los
Alamos say that there is no record of what was talked about at this conference.
But in fact, there is a record that record was held by the British because in 1946,
we knew that the Americans were not going to cut us out of access to secret information.
And we wanted to gather as much as we possibly could at that time and archive it and make sure that we had it under control.
And this was the possibly the last time that we had access to the inner thinking of what was going on at Los Alamos.
So there was a guy, I think his name was Philip Moon. He was a professor at Berkeley and for many years in nuclear physics.
And he was at this conference and he was at Fermi's lecture.
And Fermi talked about thermonuclear reactions and what you could do with thermonuclear reactions.
Obviously, one of the things you can do with thermonuclear reactions in enhanced explosive power of a bomb.
He talked about that. He but he also talked about how you could confine thermonuclear fuel with a
magnetic field and a simple a simple toroidal field would not be sufficient.
When I went to Princeton, this was known as Fermi's Theorem, and nobody knew, nobody had actually ever seen where Fermi actually wrote this down,
that you can't just take a solenoid, bend it into a into toroidal solenoid, put a plasma in it and it'll be stable.
It doesn't work. The drift, the particles just drift right out of it.
And Fermi proved it in this lecture. And the only notes we have of it were this classified report that Moon took
during the day and handed to somebody from some organisation at Night-Time,
and they took the notes away and typed them up. And you can see it was for many years a secret report and it was declassified.
And it was this was in a cockcroft archive at Churchill College and Dan Cleary of Science magazine.
I told him about this and about how we couldn't ever find any record of this.
And he was digging through Cockcroft notes.
He found this. It's in Cockcroft notes and it's also in Jp Thomson's notes from those times.
So this is Fermi talking about it in 1946,
but actually by 1946 somebody at Oxford was thinking about it because Peter Tournament was at Oxford in those days,
young Australian, he was Australian, not Kiwi.
And he, he was thinking about whether you could do deuterium, deuterium, fusion in discharges and what you would need to do.
Tournament was a thought with his hands a type of physicist.
They can be very productive. I'm not being theoretically snobbish at this point, but and he hadn't done many calculations,
and so he was probably a little ambitious about what he actually thought would happen by passing a current through.
Through a glass tube and etc. at that time.
But he gradually worked his way towards an understanding of what you need,
and it was probably really the first actual experiment on magnetically confined fusion where in the Clarendon Laboratory in 46, 47.
And then there was a similar group working at Imperial College where and cousins working under G.P. Thompson at that time.
This was the beginning of magnetic confinement.
And at that time, people made these simple estimates, as Alex showed, that if you didn't have any turbulence,
the confinement time of something that wasn't very big would be sufficient.
Confinement time, by the way, is the time basically it takes to go from the middle to the outside of the device.
And I'll use it all the time and we always give it the symbol title ee.
If you took your magnetically confined plasma and you turned off all external sources of heat and any fusion heating, and you let it cool down.
This is the time it would take to lose half of its temperature, but it's also the time it takes heat to diffuse from the middle to the outside on jet.
That's about one second on a heater.
It has to be about three, 3 to 4 seconds. And a reactor about 4 seconds is a typical confinement time with conditions that we know at this time.
It was understood right at the beginning, and people were very optimistic about Fusion in the late forties because they did
simple calculations like the ones not not not that Alex's talk was simple or anything.
It was. But the simple calculation of the diffusion across a device that was done by people.
And here's Lyman Spitzer, who in the around about 1950 started to think about magnetic confinement at that time
because there was an announcement that somebody in Argentina had actually done fusion.
It was in the front page of the New York Times, and he was a bit surprised by that announcement.
And he started to do calculations and he came up with the first design of that three dimensional object, the Stellarator.
Here it is. It's only the dome. The tube is a figure of eight.
The diameter of the tube is 100 centimetres, so a metre across the actual plasma had a radius of about 40 centimetres inside that tube.
Right. 40 centimetres would be much smaller than jet. Right.
And he'd done this wasn't just sort of without calculation, done detailed calculations of what the,
what we call classical diffusion in that non turbulent diffusion.
And he'd come up with this is the size of the device. It was very long,
this is 50 metres around etc. and it was twisted into a figure of eight because he wanted to get round Fermi's theory that
a simple toroidal device with just toroidal field going around this in one direction would not confine the particles.
What he did here was cancel the drifts of the particles,
so the particles followed the field line and drifted upwards on one half of the figure of eight,
and then they drifted downwards on the other half of the figure of eight. And those two things cancel each other.
And this was Spitzer's design in 1951.
By this time, Atonement had built several pinches discharges here, and everything had moved off to Harwell by that time up the street.
Oh, by the way, for people who don't know, that thing in Spitzer's hand is a slide rule.
And these are journals. And in Harwell in the mid fifties we built this device, which was called Z2,
which was the biggest toroidal pitch and for many years was the best fusion device out.
And it's very it's a, as the leader of a large organisation and I have to do a lot of PR.
It's a it's a solitary lesson to read about Z2 because at some point due to electric fields in the joins probably of the vacuum vessel,
they were getting high energy ions generated inside this and those high energy ions were producing some fusion neutrons.
So Cockcroft got on television and told the world that we would make energy that was too cheap to metre.
And then they discovered these weren't thermonuclear neutrons at all,
and they were just from straight field acceleration and there was no way that was scaling.
And I think it was probably the worst moment of Cockcroft life,
and it certainly set back the fusion cause because in fact it was a very good machine and we could have learned probably even more from it.
But my lab was commissioned before we realised they were not thermonuclear earth neutrons.
So good things come up. So once the first electricity,
the jet results of the late nineties where we almost got to energy breakeven and the conditions
in the middle of the device when we when we got 16 megawatts out of it but 230 million degrees,
those conditions are almost identical to what you're going to need on ITER to actually generate a full fusion burn.
So we actually produced all the conditions necessary for fusion in that device at that time.
It's what we didn't do was sustain the reaction by the fusion process itself that has made us feel that we're on the right track.
And this last two years we have produced a fusion roadmap that the European Commission has said will drive forward the programme at this point.
And the point of that fusion roadmap is to deliver a demonstration reactor in the 2014.
This would be actual produce some electricity at probably quite phenomenal cost to the electricity.
And it's a rather large and I hate to say this clumsy machine in that it uses only at this point existing technology.
And there are some serious issues with this machine, but the idea is to put a mission in front of us to actually deliver some electricity.
And then I won't have to stand in front of people who tell me it's 30 years away and always will be.
So this is the plan 2014 to get today.
This machine is very large. In fact, ITER is six metres from there to the middle of the plasma.
This device may be as large as nine metres between there and that.
These are superconducting magnets which we hope will produce up to about six Tesla in the middle of the device.
That's a little less than double of what a jet currently has.
One of the key issues about this device will be all the power loadings on the walls and on the device.
The neutrons crossing the edge of this device will give something like two megawatts per square metre of neutron flux in the wall.
That means every atom inside the steel wall will be moved ten times to 20 times
a year from its equilibrium position in the lattice of the steel in the wall.
The first self-sustained fusion burn. This is a bit more certain this would be eater.
Eater. I'd love not to talk about Eater today.
Eater is suffering from some real management issues at the moment.
It's a collaboration between seven large international partners.
45% is paid by Europe. Money coming directly from the European Commission.
Actually, 9% comes from France and the rest of the 45% from Europe.
And you can see if you know your flags, you can see what the other partners are.
This machine is designed to get off to almost self-sustained fusion.
But and one of the questions is, will it get completely self-sustained fusion done or not?
Describe what that is in a moment. It is absolutely at the edge of what we could do in terms of technology at the moment.
These superconducting magnets, which you can see wrapped around the yellow hole, which is where the plasma goes, these are niobium,
tin magnets at four degrees Kelvin producing all magnet, a field of 13.5 Tesla and in the middle of the plasma, 5.2 Tesla.
Because of the overall falloff of the magnetic field, that is pretty much as strong as you can get out of niobium tin at this point.
And so it's right at the edge of technological capability.
The plasma car will be 15 milligrams of current and jet goes up.
It can go above four, it can even go above five mg.
But 15 mega EPS is a considerable extension from that.
The energy stored in the magnetic system of E2 is about 40 gigajoule of energy.
That's equivalent to about ten tonnes of TNT.
It's power amplification. That's the amount of power going out compared to the amount going in.
The baseline target is ten. But I'm going to show you simulations that show it go to full ignition.
And a second. The cost is very useful.
The use of the greater than sine is somewhere you learn things you see as an undergraduate physicist that that's useful for life afterwards.
The official start date is 2020.
You can hear it from me and I'm prepared to stick my neck out on this one, that it won't be 2020, it will be more like 2023.
It's very late. It's very hard to move projects like this forward and to manage projects like this.
And I think as a community we need to up our game.
Just for those of you who don't understand roughly what happens in a discharge here, this is a terrible slide, isn't it?
You have a tube of plasma,
and what you do in that tube of plasma is you add it to heat that tube of plasma as you energise these coils that make it to a little solenoid.
So you make a field that goes around the toroidal direction.
So this, this field around like this, you do that with superconducting magnet.
So it's on all the time. So the beginning of a shot, actually, there is no plasma there or anything.
You puff in your fuels, deuterium and tritium into the hole in the middle.
The field's already there. Then what you do is you swing the amount of magnetic flux going down through the middle.
This is done on a transformer winding in in each.
It'll just be coils going down through the middle that change the magnetic flux through that loop.
That induces, of course, an EMF around that loop.
And that EMF is enough to break down the gas of deuterium and tritium and what you get is a current flowing around that loop.
Now the great thing about that current is like currents attract.
And so we think of it as a watch of current, the basic, basic force that holds all of this together, the pinched force, as it's called,
is the fact that the like the current going around in the toroidal direction attracts itself, pulls itself in off the wall.
And it's the self attraction of currents that pulls the plasma away from the wall
and supports the pressure gradient because the middle of this plasma is hot,
the edge is cold, and it's pushing out. Right.
And you've got to have a force that's pulling in to hold it together.
And that's the fundamental principle of how the Tokamak works.
Once you can get it into that state, you can start to heat this plasma up to 70 clear temperatures.
And I'll show you how that works in a moment with this is just a picture of the
magnetic configuration that that current will produce because you've got a field going.
Around the long way and the current in the plasma produces a twist in that field.
And Felix showed that the field lines look sort of like that.
These are terrible slides and out of focus. So I'm sorry about that.
So what that field does to the particle orbits inside the plasma is this is a picture, for instance, of the particle orbits.
And this was what Fermi actually was doing.
He was showing you what these particle orbits would look like inside an actually symmetric machine and calculating their drift motion.
And a drift motion here is a particle such as, you know,
just something a maybe a first year Oxford undergraduate could do would integrate the
equations of motion for the particle in these fields and then plot it on a nice picture.
Here you can see this is actually the motion of of an energetic alpha particle in each like field here,
because it's got a nice big fat spiral here and it's bouncing backwards and forwards inside here,
but remaining confined inside the machine so that those are the orbits.
Once you get now as you heat the plasma up and the temperature goes up, it collides less and less.
And a typical main free path in jet might be several kilometres before it actually collides with another particle.
So it will go round the machine many, many times before it actually collides.
So inside his his that pink bit of the plasma again inside.
Peter, you've got a field from the magnetic field of the coils here of 5.2 Tesla.
That's equivalent to a magnetic pressure of about 100 atmospheres.
So force is really quite large in the coils here.
The central temperature of the plasma here in a indicative e to shot is in about 20 kilowatts.
20 kilowatts is about 200 million degrees. And the plasma pressure is about seven atmospheres there.
So the hot bit of the plasma is pushing outwards. And part of the magnetic pressure is pushing inwards and holding that in place.
So that's fundamentally what is happening inside there and the reaction you want to do.
I'm going to go over this again, even though, Felix, did the reaction you want to do this is a little gift from God.
I used to give a lecture when I was teaching at UCLA about fusion being tantalisingly close, but sometimes not close enough.
And one of the tantalising things is that this reaction has a spectacularly large cross-section deuterium and tritium.
It's 100 times the next largest fusion cross-section, which is a D helium three tritium plus deuterium coming together.
Of course, you've got to get them together against the Coulomb repulsion, so they have to ram together hard enough.
And for an instance, they make helium five in the spin free half state.
J Three half state. And it's a resonant interaction.
And that's why you have such a large cross-section and that helium five then splits up into helium four natural helium and a neutron.
And the point I'm making here is this is charged and this is not so in your fusion reactor you have two different particles,
4/5 of the energy because of momentum and energy conservation comes out of the neutron and one fifth comes out as the alpha particle,
the helium nucleus. Right now, the helium nucleus is charged, so it stays inside the magnetic bottle.
It's confined by the magnetic field.
The neutron, on the other hand, doesn't see the magnetic field, crosses the magnetic field and into the wall of your device.
Now, the problem with this reaction, I mean, it's a gift to have such a large cross-section.
But the problem is this tritium, a really remarkable nucleus.
Really, when you think about it, it means you've got one proton and two neutrons.
It's sort of very asymmetric. Tritium doesn't exist in nature.
It has a half life of 12.4 years, so you just don't find it.
You've got to make it. And the way to make it is to bombard lithium.
If a neutron hits lithium six, you will get helium and tritium out.
And you can take that tritium and you can put it back in and do your fusion reaction with it.
So tritium actually isn't a fuel. Tritium is only an intermediary because your fusion reactor has to do two reactions.
It has to do this one and that one, and tritium is produced here, consumed here.
And so it's not actually a fuel. The fuels are lithium and deuterium.
There is 60 billion years worth of of deuterium, fuel.
If we power the whole planet with fusion in seawater and there is a thousand years worth of lithium in the Indian mountains,
in lithium carbonate, it's in salty brines in the Andes Mountains, and there's 30 million years worth of lithium in seawater.
So it's very abundant fuel sources. Okay.
Important point here is you react to has to have this thing going on at about 250 million degrees or between 150 million and 250 million degrees.
And this going on in your walls to produce your tritium to go around.
This happens in something we call blankets in the wall where you deliberately put
lithium into the blanket and breed your tritium in the wall out of the blanket.
So in E to the middle is hot enough that that reaction will be going on at around about five megawatts of power,
permit the cubed of the plasma in the middle of each other and it's producing the helium and the neutron.
From that reaction, the helium gets trapped and stays in the plasma and it has 3.5 megawatts of energy.
The plasma has 20 kilowatts. So that helium goes through the plasma.
Getting that up just by collisional processes and depositing its energy in the plasma.
So that's about 100 megawatts of heating at full power in each hour, and the power from the neutrons comes into the world.
We will not breed most of the tritium for ITER, but we will have six panels on the wall with what we should call the test blanket modules.
Six panels on the wall, testing out six concepts for the breeding blanket on the wall of Eater.
And so of Europe has two of those panels.
The US has decided not to have a panel on the wall and one of the other partners has decided not to have a panel on the wall.
But basically the partners have experiments on the wall to test their concepts that breeding tritium from lithium in the wall.
Key point here, self heating. If you get enough fusion, a fifth of the power will come out of self heating of the plasma.
A nice, handy, dandy formula for the fusion power per metre cubed of plasma can be expressed in these units
where that is the pressure of the plasma in atmospheres and this is megawatts per metric acute.
In order to make a power station, you've got to get at least megawatts per metre cubed, if not more.
Otherwise are going to have to build something the size of Wembley Stadium in order to get the gigawatt out.
So this is a nice, handy dandy formula that works. It's an approximation to all the cross-sections, but a fifth of that fusion power, right,
which is approximately p squared over 50, has to be balanced by the losses which are proportional to the energy in the plasma.
So the pressure divided by this confinement time, the time that it takes for the turbulence to work the heat out.
So this would say if you wanted to get self-heating, you have to get enough fusion to beat the losses due to turbulence.
And if you look at that and this is a time in seconds,
it says you've got to have a confinement time of several seconds in order to be in self-sustained kind of regime.
That's just estimation. This is sort of state of the art simulation of Ito.
This is somebody who's taken all the models of the turbulent transport,
the heating, etc., and put it in a great big CO to model the whole system of ITO.
Okay, so this is time along the bottom here in seconds and let's see what's happening here and fusion power up this side.
Now what you do in ITR is the magnets are on the coils around their superconducting, they're on all the time.
Basically you put in your deuterium and tritium in here and you induce the
current in the plasma by changing the flux through the middle of the Taurus.
So by this time you've actually got a plasma going right here.
But this plasma is it about 10 million degrees, thereabouts.
It's what we call ultimately heated at this point.
At this point here, what this is, is the heater beams going on, the heater beams on E to a beams of neutral particles that come in from the outside.
They slam into the plasma, the heat, the plasma up to the temperatures.
For fusion, they have to be neutral because if they were charged, they wouldn't get through the magnetic field.
So what you have is you have an accelerator that accelerates the charge particle
over neutralise the charged particle to send it in as a neutral atom on jet.
We do that by accelerating negative ions. Sorry, positive chance.
Get the right way around. I'm looking at Barry right here of positive ions and then attaching an electron
to it by passing it through a gas and then injecting it into the plasma.
On Aether they will attach an extra electron to the atom and accelerate it as a negative ion and knock that extra electron off.
And it will come in as a negative, as a as a neutral particle.
So what you've got here is 70 megawatts of power coming into the plasma as those neutral particles,
they slam into the middle of the plasma, get ionised and deposit their energy into the middle of the plasma.
Then the temperature on each of shoots up the temperature I need to shoot up.
And I think in this case, we're getting to about 200 to 230 million degrees.
So 20 to 23 kilowatts at this point. By this time, the deuterium, tritium, fusion power has gone up at the beginning.
It's exponential, and then it goes up as a power law.
So you can see it really is dramatic how much fusion power comes up as the as the temperature goes up, we'll take the red line for obvious reasons.
In the red line you'll see the modelling here has relaxation oscillations in the middle of the class.
We do not model the turbulence directly here. We take the results of those turbulence codes.
We fit them to empirical formulas, and we put them into these systems codes.
And so at this point, we go through now what's happening to the heating as we step down to 50.
Because by the time you've got up to here, the fusion reactions are producing enough heat to be part of the self-sustaining into the plasma.
And actually, what you can do in this red, blue and green case is you can turn off the power of 400.
And the plasma will self-sustained. That's the burning plasma.
That's the plasma in which the fusion itself is providing the heat to keep the plasma hot, to keep it going.
And that is what it really has to do. They'll tell you they wanted to get two Q equals ten.
I'll tell you what I want them to do is to get to a really properly what we call ignited state of self-sustaining,
that like this recording this is simulations from Princeton Group and a scan two was the one that they considered to have the best model, best models.
What they did is they degraded that model. And they said, okay, if that model and our uncertainty in the theory is not very good,
what they did is they lowered one of the boundary values on the temperature and we got skin free here.
This can free would be exciting. Not as exciting as that because it's still self-sustained fusion.
No energy and basically energy out. So that's lovely.
But Skin four would be disastrous. So what happened in scattered forms can form as interesting as you produce fusion reactions.
You make helium that helium heats the plasma, but it is a pollutant.
It's diluting your fuel. It's ash. It's the result of fusion reactions.
So if the heat in builds up, you'll poison the reaction and the tokamak will go out.
And if you so, if. If the turbulence does not flush the helium out after it's slowed down and deposit its energy in there,
you will get a build up of ash and you're talking about will go out in the case of scan for he turned off the turbulent diffusion
of the helium and what happened is it built up and then you can see it went out even before you turned off the heating power.
Right. We don't know exactly how to turn this will interact with the alpha particles.
And that's something we wish to learn from jet more about in the in the next few years.
So that's that's the dramatic thing that could happen on E to each is an experiment.
It's not a demonstration. It's an experiment.
We think that it's this kind of behaviour we will get to, but we have to be aware that we don't know everything that we do over the timescale.
Is that really 400, 400 C at full power?
You'll be able to do something in the thousand to 2000 seconds before heating of various components will be too much.
And you have to turn the machine off. So.
So what was the longest sustained time?
So, James, I'm going to show you that in a second.
But this is about this notion of self-sustaining diffusion here.
Now, looking from this point of view to the decomposition, thinking about 280.
Yeah. So what are we. Well, the plasma, right.
Is it about 23 K and all the reactions are happening in the tail of the Maxwell.
As often happens in these cases, you don't want to hit the temperature to be at the peak of the cross-section of dty,
which is which is about 60 K is the peak.
Because when you get up there, the radiation from the plasma is the best place to sit is a bit lower temperature in the peak of
the diffusion cross-section because the radiation cross-sections are really coming up steeply.
By the time you get to 60 K,
so the optimum temperature to run it is less than the peak of the actual fusion cross-section because you want to keep the radiation down,
particularly the synchrotron radiation. Sorry. The other thing I would mention the poisoning output.
Mm hmm. What about the need for the neutral atoms of deuterium?
Well, you can actually inject tritium, so you're just injecting fuel.
The other way we put fuel into it is we make frozen pellets, and we fly them in as fast as you can.
And they cross before they oblate. They cross a certain distance and that's how you get deuterium and tritium into the middle of the plasma.
One of the questions we don't know the answer to this is will the turbulence differentially transport tritium and deuterium differently?
So we would like to keep 5050 deuterium and tritium everywhere in the plasma.
But if the deuterium is better transported by turbulence than the tritium,
that you'll end up with not 5050, and then you won't have an optimal situation.
So lots of questions that we really don't know the answer to.
And one of the reasons that we're going to do another blast, a huge blast of deuterium and tritium in jet towards the end of this decade.
And I'm about to describe describe that. How do we know this will happen?
Barry smiling at me. Do we know it will happen?
We know it will happen. Partly from empirical extrapolation, from where we are, partly from the theoretical models that have been being described,
and partly from dimensionless dimensionally similar experiments.
So if you if you write the answers in dimensionless quantities and you try and produce a jet discharge that looks like at each discharge,
but just the change is in in the scaling, right.
You should be able to understand what the scale up is.
ETA is twice the size of JET. So the most important machine in the world by far is the next biggest one to each of which is Jet.
And Jet is the only machine in the world that can currently run in tritium.
We had one other which was TFT in the States and they weren't as good as us, so they closed the machine down.
But it's very important in the lead up to each that we use JET as effectively as possible to reduce the risk in the program.
Each program has risks in it, and we can make those less by making sure that on Jet we discover everything necessary.
Going into that, the extrapolation from Jet to E2 is only a factor of two in size, but it is a regime that we've not really been into.
So we are using physics as much as possible to predict that performance, and we hope we will get there.
I will say in the laser world, the extrapolation to NIF from the previous machine Nobel was a huge extrapolation,
and one of the problems that the NIF programme is having at the moment is that
they had nothing in between and it's very important at the moment to run.
This is a picture inside Jet at the moment and three years ago we replaced the inside wall of Jet.
So it was understood in 2009 a report to the commission chaired by Albrecht Bogner, who used to be the head of DSC.
Albrecht, one of his committee, said it is absolutely important to keep jet running right up to the beginning of of each year
because what we will learn from JET will allow us to have expertise going into each operation.
But a key thing is to change jet so that it has the same raw materials as Ito.
And what we've done is this all used to be carbon on the inside of jet, these tiles, etc. all used to be carbon fibre composites.
And this is now beryllium and this is tungsten down here.
This is the what we call the diverter or the system at the bottom.
And this is the robotic arms which we did all the work with. So we now can maintain a jet entirely from externally.
And this is important as we go into tritium operation again, because once you've operating with tritium,
the inside of a jet becomes a hazardous environment and you can't send people inside.
So this capability that we've developed over the last decade and a half in main maintenance in the machine robotically allows us to go forward.
And the key experiments go back to those 1997 experiments, which we call DP one, when we actually did some fusion power out of jet of considerable.
We've run tritium since then in 2003, but they weren't full power.
Tritium shocks. This was the famous shop 16 megawatts here.
But you can see 2 seconds and actually just be honest about it.
It wasn't the best two shots.
I mean, it's a fantastic amount of computing power, but something happened to it right there and it plunged right back down again.
And so it is very transitory in that.
And there were about 24 megawatts of power going in at that time to get that 16 megawatts out.
A much better shot, actually. And something we've used in the prediction is this one where you turn the machine on,
you ramp up the power, you get fusion power, 4.5 megawatts and you turn it off at the end of the shot.
You cannot run longer than this widget because the systems one will run at full power for longer than about five or 6 seconds.
And so that's really all you can do. This was the best the Americans could do, say no more.
But we've been given permission to do tritium again. So about a month ago we launched the project to re engage all of our tritium capability.
We still have tritium on site and we've kept our capability through the years.
But now the plan is to start tritium operation in 2017 and to break our records.
And what the predictions of the code say is that we can probably get up to about.
20 megawatts for about five or 6 seconds.
It says 2015 because I was promised we could start in 2015 and now it's 2017.
So sorry about that. But I think it's very important to do this because there's a lot of questions that we don't know about for the tritium operation.
I'm running out of time, so I will move on very quickly.
Question Can we make it smaller and cheaper? The problems is to the size of jet.
The size of it are set by being big enough that the time it takes turbulence to move
the hot plasma to the edge of the cold plasma to the middle is 3 to 4 seconds.
And if we could go back to almost ten months free operation, the size of the machine would shrink to tens of centimetres instead of many metres,
and it would make a lot of difference in the development of fusion.
I think it's crucial to get to electricity as soon as possible. So I'm fully in support of demo and of beta.
But what we need to be doing right now with the more academic side of things is looking to ways to make it smaller, cheaper, faster, etc.
I can't guarantee anything here, but could we go towards more?
Well, at least reduced tokamaks. And what we've done with Oxford is to assemble the best.
I think we now have the best theoretical plasma physics fusion plasma physics group in the world here at this collection check in power.
Michael Bonds, who's joining from Texas, Edmund Haycock, who's it to join our effort?
Maudlin really done some absolutely terrific work. And I want you to just highlight what that was and what we were thinking.
Okay. So the the turbulence is really quite small scale compared to the size of the device.
In fact, the typical eddy size is the size of these of a radio.
It's a few times that and it means there are about a thousand eddies in the size of each.
But terms is really small scale. It's not these big turbulent eddies, etc., it's this small scale stuff.
And how can you change that? Because you've got this free energy source, which is it's hot there, it's cold there.
Can you really reduce that?
Well, one of the things and I think I'm going to skip through this because it's been covered before, but this term, this is fully kinetic.
There are almost no collisions. It's not a fluid. It's it's a collection of charged particles in phase space that makes up a plasma.
And so it's truly a5d problem. And to simulate on an even on the best computers simulating in five D,
the best way to make progress is through smart theory and not through big computers,
because big computers get you a factor of two every now and again. And smart theory can get you a factor of a thousand every now and again.
And the key thing here was to average out all the all the timescales to make the problem as compact as possible.
And then it could go on a large computer and a key one was this averaging around the motion, around the free lines,
and to produce the distribution function of charged rings as opposed to a distribution
function of particles that reduced it from six dimensions to five dimensions,
but also reduced the time scales that we have to solve on.
And that was critical, those simulations.
The second thing that reduced the number and that reduction took down the computational
problem by about a factor of ten to the three by a factor of a thousand.
The second one was this idea of simulating not the whole plasma at once, but only one correlated volume at a time.
And this reduced the size of the volume that you had to solve on your supercomputer.
This was another factor of a thousand in the calculation. You've seen this before, but the key thing here was an observation of what happened.
This this plasma is rotating. You think it's rotating like a smoke group.
You think it's a toroidal vortex doing this, but actually it's an inverse bipolar effect.
It's really rotating in the long way round. And because of the striations,
it looks like it's rotating the short way round in the middle is rotating one way and the outside is rotating the other way.
The main rotation is being taken out. That rotation turns out to be incredibly important.
What it does is it combs out the large eddies that want to move lots of hot stuff all the way out and back in again.
You can see how they're being sheared apart by the sheer and the rotation.
And in fact, this region here, there's so much shear, there's almost no turbulence.
We observe that in JET. We observe that in mast is that the turbulence can be suppressed by the share in the rotation quite considerably.
In fact, this is what you see in the Big Bang Theory.
The Big Bang Theory is produced in Los Angeles,
and I used to be a professor at UCLA before I came back to the To Run column and we were having a conference.
I think actually Alex was there and the technical adviser to the Big Bang Theory is Dave Saltzberg, who's a particle physicist at UCLA.
And every Monday afternoon he goes to the the set of the Big Bang Theory, and he writes things on the whiteboard for Sheldon to to to display.
And we had been thinking about shared rotation in Tokamaks and talking about sheering apart
the eddy structures by stretching them out and how much we could suppress the turbulence.
By doing that, it's not obvious that by rotating and producing a sheared flow that you make the turbulence better, you might make it worse.
And so there's all kinds of calculations going on here.
But anyway, what Dave Saltzberg did was to take the white board that was sitting in the physics department there,
copy down what was on it, and then put it on to the white board, the Big Bang Theory.
And so that's an actual still. That's fine.
Anyway, can we share away the turbulence?
Well, his very interesting calculation.
So about three or four years ago when when Felix Power came here and Michael Barnes was here and Edmund Haycock was just a PhD student,
we had a project to say what would be the optimum shared rotation we put into the project.
So along here is the rotation share in units you don't have to care about an up here is the turbulent
heat flux and we're normally working in a plasma that has a temperature gradient of about the red curve.
And so what you can see is as you increase the rotation shift, you come to a region here with no turbulence, no turbulent heat flux and no turbines.
We're about here right now on the mast device column.
If we can get down into this spot here, we should see a dramatic increase in the quality of the confinement.
So there's a sort of optimum shear rate here that might be there.
So there's little Haynes and the plasma sometimes does this.
Sometimes it produces sheared parts of the plasma where there's almost no turbines.
There's little hints that having a having a magnetic confinement device without turbines is possible.
And what we need we need from the theoreticians now is to lead.
Somebody earlier said, you know, other theoreticians, just tell me I'm done.
Are the theoreticians just explaining the experiments or are they leading the experiments here?
We want them to lead the experiments. We're building a new machine at Culham.
It's an assembly right now. It'll be on line this time next year.
It will rotate at Mach one, and we will hope to hit that sweet spot.
One more thing. We have to rotate that by momentum input.
And what Felix has shown, something quite remarkable is that turbulence sometimes can produce velocity shear without there being any momentum input.
It transports some angular momentum inwards, the opposite of momentum outwards,
and produces a sheared rotation inside your device with no net momentum input.
That would be fantastic because then maybe we can encourage future fusion reactions, reactors to rotate on their own.
So thank you very much.