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.

Tagebau Hambach and VI-HPS Inauguration

Wednesday I attended the inauguration of the Virtual Institute for High Productivity Supercomputing, a new academic effort at Jülich. Most of the day was scheduled for lectures, which weren't too bad. I met Douglas Post, the Chief Scientist for the United States Department of Defense, and also a few researchers from Tennessee, Oregon, and Dresden. You could tell who Douglas Post worked for. His keynote address bristled with phrases like "smart bomb" and "F-16 turbine" and "gulf coast oil rig" and "terrorist threat".

But the really exciting stuff was after the lectures when we went on an "excursion" to the largest open coal mine in Europe: Tagebau Hambach. Our guide was exactly what you'd hope to find in a coal mine. (Not Dick Cheney; that's what you wish to find in a coal mine.) Our guide was a short, densely-built, muscular German with thick wiry red hair and beard who looked like his favorite past time was banging rocks together. He was clearly very familiar with mining and the English tour was excellent.


Some of Germany's finest minds encased in green plastic. The lady in red is wearing high-heels, poor fool. I valiantly caught her in my arms as she fell from our all-terrain bus.


Photos can't properly describe the sheer size of Tagebau Hambach. It was first opened in 1978 and will continue to produce coal for another forty-or-so years. The coal layer is 70 meters deep, the deepest deposit in Europe. Mining the entire strip will require relocating three towns and an enormous forest. Sad as that is, the environmental directors take their job very seriously. Every square kilometer of destroyed forest is duplicated as exactly as possible on the far side of the mine. Seeds and saplings from the original plants are used, and even ant hills and wasp nests are transported. A few days before, I went running in the relocated forest and was completely unaware that it was "artificial." It's probably not as good as the original, but it's better than many mining companies have done in past. Actually, the company is not required to rebuild the destroyed forest. They're doing it just because they like trees.


Looks like Mordor to me.


This is the "bucket wheel" of one of the six 245 meter tall excavators. That wheel is about the size of a small house and can be moved with millimeter precision. The main structure is tracked via GPS and local computer equipment and can be moved by centimeters. Four operators take two-hour shifts controlling the massive wheel.


After Tagebau Hambach, we went to Burg Obbendorf for a three-course buffet dinner (I was inordinately pleased that I could identify by taste two out of three wines served). A little rain storm came in just before dinner, leaving this gorgeous rainbow.

God has blessed me so much this summer. It's just amazing.

Chocolate! Charlemagne! Fireworks! Giant Spiders!

I've been pretty busy the last two weeks, but last weekend I managed a day-trip to Aachen with four other PhD students, Binh, Ivo, Kyle, and Anna.


Our first stop was the Lindt chocolate factory! This place is amazing! We weren't allowed inside the actual factory (might frighten the oompa-loompas), but there's a great outlet store where you can buy TONS of chocolate for pennies. Kyle walked out with about 3KG (6.61lbs) of lovely Swiss chocolate for less than $20.

Next we took a nice walking tour of Aachen. Aachen is famous for it's sulfur springs and there are natural fountains all over the city. (The sulfur spring tasted like warm, runny eggs.)


It's not a lamp-post, but this reminds me of Lucy Pevensie.


This coach house was a bookshop in the 18th century, but the bookseller couldn't read or write! He didn't stay in business long and died a barrel-maker.


The Aachen Cathedral, and the only square in Aachen that actually has four sides! Every other open area is a triangle. This is because when the Romans laid the streets of Aachen they oriented them along their major highway, which runs south-west to north-east. However, cathedrals are all built facing north-south, so when Charlemagne rebuilt the roads to correspond with the cathedral, all the squares were bisected.

The cathedral is amazing! It's one of the first twelve sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List and was the coronation church for the German kings for about 600 years. The central part is the oldest: an octagonal tower with a 16-angled dome built by Charlemagne in 786. He's buried there today. The glass choir hall on the left was added when the central chapel couldn't hold all the pilgrims, and the tower on the right-side was added some time after that.


I just loved this garden on the roof. Downtown Aachen is packed with these beautiful European houses.

There was a huge festival that night back in Jülich in the Brückenkopf park, an old Napoleonic fort just over the Rur river.


These hot air balloons drifted past my apartment window while I was getting ready for the party.


Elvis lives! And he has a German accent! And can't dance for peanuts! I laughed so hard I almost fell over. Just when I didn't think they could top that, the band started playing "Sweet home Alabama". It is a physical impossibility for a German to say "Alabama". He is guaranteed to say "Ala-bauma".


There was an AMAZING fireworks show, the best I've ever seen. The fireworks were synchronized to music from Hook and Pirates of the Caribbean (the first movie, the only good one), and you were allowed to get very close to the launchers.


After the fireworks, an Indian tribe did a dance. I had to come all the way to Germany to see native Americans?!?


This guy was waiting for me back in my apartment. That's a 1-Euro coin, about the size of an American quarter-dollar. Can somebody tell me what it is?