San Diego’s General Atomics delivers the first piece of the world’s strongest magnet to France

The first of seven modules, which are a crucial part of an international effort aimed at turning the vast potential of fusion energy into a reality, has been successfully shipped overseas from the San Diego area – and another will leave the door this week.

General Atomics manufactures and tests parts of the central magnet – the most powerful magnet in the world – which is being used in the mammoth ITER nuclear fusion project near the town of Cadarache in southern France.

The ITER project hopes to make significant advances in the development of fusion energy, a technology its proponents say could provide the world with a virtually inexhaustible supply of clean electricity.

The first module left the 60,000 square meter warehouse at the General Atomics Magnetic Technologies Center in Poway in June. It was then towed to the Houston Ship Channel in a purpose-built truck for two weeks and then shipped across the Atlantic to Marseille, France, arriving on July 25th.

The £ 250,000 module will complete its trip to the ITER (pronounced “eater”) via another specially designed truck next month.

“This is really a major milestone in the US ITER project,” said James Van Dam of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences on video Tuesday at an event at the Poway warehouse where comments from energy officials and elected officials were included.

The second module is loaded on Friday, goes to Houston and follows the same route to France as the first.

“I don’t mean to say it’s routine because nothing like that is routine, but we are now at the point where we are confident that the plan we have put in place will work,” said John Smith, Director of Engineering and Projects for General Atomics.

John Smith, Director of Engineering and Projects at General Atomics, points out the second module being shipped overseas for the ITER nuclear fusion project. A total of six modules form the central magnet at the heart of the international fusion project.

(General atomics)

A total of seven modules will be shipped from Poway to France. Six will eventually be stacked on top of each other and placed at the heart of the ITER project, allowing about 45,000 amps of current to flow through the central solenoid valve. A seventh module serves as a reserve in case something goes wrong with one of the others.

Each module is seven feet high and 4.4 feet in diameter and is surrounded by 3.6 miles of conductor segments with six layers of electrical tape totaling more than 180 miles.

The central solenoid valve is designed to create a strong magnetic field that directs and shapes an intensely hot, energy-producing plasma that looks like a cloud. When the hydrogen plasma reaches 150 million degrees Celsius (more than 300 million degrees Fahrenheit), fusion occurs.

This temperature is ten times hotter than the core of the sun.

ITER is not a power plant. Rather, it is a research project aimed at paving the way for the development of facilities that could use fusion to generate electricity. In fact, commercial facilities have never been built and fusion energy has only been generated in the laboratory for very short periods of time.

A coalition of 35 nations is contributing components and expertise to ITER. As part of its contribution, Japan supplied approximately 42 miles of the steel-clad superconductor to the General Atomics modules.

The ITER site on approximately 445 hectares of land has been under construction since 2010 and is around 75 percent complete. The first tests of the plasma are scheduled for 2025.

Construction of the ITER nuclear fusion project outside the city of Cardarache, France in May 2021.

(ITER organization / EJF Riche)

Nuclear fusion is different from the fission process seen in commercial nuclear power plants such as the now closed San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant. Fission splits the nuclei of atoms to create energy, while fusion causes hydrogen nuclei to collide and fuse into helium atoms, releasing enormous amounts of energy.

Nuclear fusion led to the development of the hydrogen bomb, and since the 1950s scientists and researchers have been looking for a way to use fusion as a source of electricity.

Proponents believe that fusion could be an ideal source of energy, since the deuterium fuel it needs is readily available from seawater and its only by-product would be helium. Fusion does not emit any greenhouse gases.

“This will change the world,” said Van Dam.

But Fusion has its critics. Skeptics sometimes repeat an old gibberish that fusion as a practical source of energy is always 30 years away. Others ask whether nuclear fusion can be used as a practical source of energy, and some environmental groups are against any form of nuclear power.

The ITER project was expected to cost around $ 7 billion, but recent estimates suggest the cost could end up being ten times higher, leading some critics to say that price diverts resources away from other energy projects.

In May, ITER Director General Bernard Bigot said in a media briefing that the project will face increased costs and delays in testing due to complications with global supply chains related to COVID-19. Bigot didn’t elaborate on it, but told reporters that he expected to submit an assessment by the end of the year that would provide details.

Smith said General Atomics had not experienced any pandemic-related delays in working on the modules.

The US contribution accounts for about 9 percent of the ITER cost, but the US will have access to 100 percent of the project’s data and intellectual property, which would prove valuable in developing future fusion programs and power plants.

ITER originally stood for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, but in recent years organizers have tried to separate the name from thermonuclear weapons as the project does not produce the fissile material needed to build an explosive. Instead, they prefer to emphasize the Latin word “iter”, which means “the way”.