JET: The Jülich Tokamak Fusion Reactor

Check this out! Last week my friend Ivo managed to hook me up with a tour of the Tokamak fusion reactor at Jülich. Technically, you aren't supposed to take pictures anywhere in the research center, and this is particularly true of the reactors, but I took as many as I could before security shut me down and made me promise not to post certain photos on the net. If you want to see more, check out the official photos here and the really awesome videos here.


Mission control! The hallowed control consoles for all fusion experiments. Jülich's engineers and physicists can monitor all aspects of the reactor from here. A typical experiment lasts between five and seven seconds (the longest on record is 12 seconds) and an experiment can be run every five minutes or so.


That pipe-looking thinggy is a coax cable, just like you plug into the back of your TV. Only bigger. Much bigger.


This was the last thing I was allowed to photograph. At times like these, green is my favorite color. "Bunker-Verlassen" can be translated as "abandon the bunker!".

These next two photos are from the TEXTOR website, but they look almost exactly like the photos I was told not to post.


The inside of the reactor as seen through an observation port. In here, hydrogen plasma is heated to 50 million degrees and held in a 60,000 volt toroidal magnetic field. The plasma is invisible, since the hydrogen atoms have been striped of their electrons, but the "cool" plasma near the walls will emit an eerie pink glow. (No pink here, since the reactor was inactive.)


The power cables for the reactor. Research Center Jülich as a three-million Euro annual power budget. Ivo asked if the physicists were required to notify the power company before turning on the reactor. Our guide just laughed and said, "Oh, they know when we turn it on."


After the fusion reactor, we tried to get a look at one of the old fission reactors. Research center Jülich was origionally named "Kernforschungsanlage Jülich" (Nuclear Research Institute Jülich) and sported two fission reactors, but one is now decommissioned and the second is in the decommission process. Security around these reactors was extremely high. That white dome was the only thing I could photograph, and I was immediately told to put my camera away. There's a double-layer fence, guard towers, and security cameras all over the place. We couldn't get inside, on account of not having signed documents from the police. Wow.


Today it's a radio tower, but it was originally built to measure the strength and extent of nuclear fallout in case of a reactor meltdown.

Some interesting facts, comparing nuclear fission to nuclear fusion:

• When a fusion reactor fails, the plasma's energy is dissipated onto the reactor walls, they heat to about 400 degrees C or so, and nothing too exciting happens.
  
• When a fission reactor fails, you get Chernobyl.
• Nuclear fusion produces very little radioactive waste, and this waste is dangerous for only 50 years.
  
• The United States Department of Energy states that in Ohio alone, nuclear fission has produced "31 million pounds of uranium product", "2.5 billion pounds of waste", "2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris", all of which will be harmful for thousands of years.
  
• Three baseball-sized garden rocks and three liters of water contain enough fusion-fuel to power a household for an entire year.
• Every fusion reactor to-date has consumed far more energy that it ever produced, but the ITER reactor will be the first to actually produce power. (It won't be a power plant, just a proof of concept.)
• The first fusion power reactors should go online sometime between 2050 and 2070. Mr. Fusion!
  

So! There's your physics lesson for today.