LHC@home

Tokamak Energy - which grew out of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, also based in Oxfordshire - is currently manufacturing a new test facility and demonstration system with a full set of magnets. This will test the interaction of all the HTS magnets and validate their use within a full tokamak system for the first time. The new magnet system is scheduled for testing in 2022.

The company is working with CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, on HTS magnets in developing a proprietary technology that will scale to the large magnets necessary for fusion power modules. HTS magnets also have applications for particle accelerators, aerospace and for several other industrial sectors.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Tokamak-Energy-develops-new-magnet-protection-tech

This is interesting. The magnet developed for CERN might be of use in fusion reactors.

ENI, the Italian State oil firm, is advertising a fusion project called Sparc, wiith a spinoff partner from MIT, Commonwealth Fusion Energy. It boasts new superconducting magnets on a Tokamak reactor. Naturally MIT has a long history in fusion projects, starting with Alcator (Alto Campu Torus) designed by professor Bruno Coppi, whom I interviewed in 1969 at the Internationl Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, now named after Abdus Salam.The Alcator project was followed bu Ignitor, a joint Italian-Russian project. It should have been built at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow but the project seems to have died.
Tullio

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Yes, I am familiar with Commonwealth Fusion Systems and SPARC. They use the "new" high-temperature superconductors, allowing their machine to be smaller and more efficient.

They seem to be making good progress, and could be the first one to achieve breakeven.
https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusion-energy-0908

A fusion reactor produces 14 MeV neutrons, not electricity. To produce electricity you must boil some water and produce vapor which turns the turbines. You are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics. I think the part of a fusion reactor needed to obtain this result is the divertor, which is being developed at Culham, UK, and at Frascati, Italy. It's a long way to Tipperary...
Tullio

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In Greifswald (Germany) is Wendelstein 7-X from MPI as a Stellarator in a experimental phase.
No one know for the future which type of nuclear fusion (Tokamak or Stellarator) will win the competition.

The biggest fusion experiment is ITER being built in France. It should give the first plasma in 2025. Commonwealth Fusion Systems says that their power goal is one fourth that of ITER but their size is one 64th of ITER. The ITER magnets are being built also in Italy besides Japan and are ferried by ship from Riviera Ligure to Provence, since they are too big to enter the railway tunnels.The idea of using high magnetic fields (20 Tesla) goes back to Bruno Coppi and his Alcator, but of course there has been a development in superconducting materials.Let the best win.
Tullio

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The current ITER divertor design may not work properly and may requires significant modifications or new innovative design to prevent serious damage and to ensure successful operation.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33483568/

I don't know if the same thing is true for Commonwealth Fusion Systems, but as you point out there are a lot of design considerations beyond just getting fusion for a short period of time.

I know that a divertor is being built in the Frascati laboratory of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare. Frascati built the first Intersecting Storage Ring, ADA, designed by an Austrian physicist, Bruno Touschek and also gravitational wave detectors at cryogenic temperatures of the resonant mass type. The Tokamaks face big engineering problems, not only plasma physics issues.
Tullio

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CFS didn’t appear out of nowhere. Their roots lie in the nuclear fusion research performed since the 1960s at MIT, when a scientist called Bruno Coppi was working on the Alcator A (Alto Campo Toro being Italian for High Field Torus) tokamak, which saw first plasma in 1972.

https://hackaday.com/2021/09/27/commonwealth-fusions-20-tesla-magnet-a-bright-sparc-towards-fusions-future/

The Italians are all over the place.

In 1969, when I was working as a physics and astronomy at Mondadori Edizioni Scientifiche in Milano, I inteviewed Bruno Coppi at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, later named for Abdus Salam.. A colleague of mine at Mondadori had a brother working at the Joint European Torus in Culham, UK.This is still doing research in spite of Brexit..I know that an Italian lady ls leading fusion rresearch at Fermilab in Chicago.
Tullio

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I know that an Italian lady ls leading fusion rresearch at Fermilab in Chicago.

I visited Fermilab while at the University of Chicago. It is one of the reasons I support CMS.

CMS is the only CERN program which does not run on my Windows PCs. It stops saying that Condor exited after about ten thousand seconds.I have been running Test4Theory@home since its begining. I was invited by Ben Segal to take part in the Alpha version in Linux.
Tullio

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I think it runs OK for me on Windows, though I have not tried the new 60.00 CMS yet on Win 10, so I will run a few and we will see.
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/results.php?hostid=10693612&offset=0&show_names=0&state=0&appid=11

There will probably be the occasional "VBox can't manage" error, but that is more of a problem with VBox I think.

The CMS all ran OK on Win10 without any hangups, but I had to limit them to 10 at a time on the Ryzen 3600 with 32 GB of memory.
And I noticed that the BOINC data folder had grown to 50 GB in size. That may be the cause of some of the problems people are having with VBox on the CMS.

On QuChemPredAI@home, which is a Linux project, most Windows tasks with VirtuaBox are faster than their Linux wingmen on my Intel i5 9400F. But a problem with Windows certificates is blocking all Windows uploads, so I have switched to an old Linux laptop with an AMD E-450 CPU, vintage 2014.
Tullio

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