We would like to invite all colleagues to a lecture as part of an extraordinary colloquium aimed to current status of the ITER tokamak under construction. The lecture of Richard Pitts, Section Leader of Experiments and Plasma Operation at ITER, will be held on Thursday, October 24 at 4:30 p.m. in the Břehová building, lecture hall no. 103 (1st floor). The management of the Physics of Plasma and Thermonuclear Fusion department cordially invites you.
About ITER and its status
The ITER tokamak will be the largest device of this kind ever built and is currently well into construction next door to the French Atomic Energy Commission’s Cadarache site in the South of France. It will produce deuterium-tritium plasmas that create more fusion energy than needed to heat them (Q > 1) and be dominantly heated by the fusion reactions themselves (Q > 5), with a primary target of Q = 10 at a plasma current of 15 MA, in a fully actively cooled, nuclear environment aiming for plasma pulses in the range of a few 100 to a few 1000 seconds. It aims to test the integrated technologies, materials, and physics regimes necessary for the commercial production of fusion-based electricity. It is an international collaboration of 7 major parties (with Europe as the major stakeholder) whose combined peoples represent more than half the world’s population. It is a construction project of unprecedented complexity and has recently experienced issues with some of the major first-of-a-kind components for which repairs are currently underway and progressing rapidly. This, combined with delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic, have required a “re-baselining of the project, now essentially complete, to try and minimize the time to first plasma and the achievement of first burning plasmas. The seminar will introduce the ITER device, try to communicate the scale and complexity of the installation, describe the current status of remedial actions to recover delays and provide a brief summary of the re-baseline strategy and expected schedule to first plasma.
Who is Richard Pitts
Richard Pitts earned his PhD. in 1991 from the University of London, UK, in collaboration with UKAEA Culham Laboratories, for experimental research with electrostatic probes in the plasma boundary of the DITE, TEXTOR and COMPASS tokamaks. Following a year working on a task agreement at JET, he moved to a postdoctoral position at the CRPP Lausanne (now SPC) and established a plasma boundary research programme on the then new tokamak TCV, which began operation in 1993. A two year postdoc turned into a 16 year stay in Switzerland, but included a 7 year period between 1999 – 2007 with regular short term secondments back to JET, acting first as Deputy, then Leader of the Exhaust Physics Task Force under the European Fusion Development Agreement. In 2008 Richard moved to the ITER Organization (IO) to lead the Plasma-Wall Interactions Section and then, from 2019 the newly formed Experiments and Plasma Operation Section within the Science Division. He is the author/co-author of over 450 journal papers and, since arriving at the IO, has collaborated with experimental and modelling teams in almost all of the ITER Member fusion institutes.