COMMENT Editor: David Chadwick (cad.user@btc.co.uk) News Editor: Mark Lyward (mark.lyward@btc.co.uk) Advertising Sales: Josh Boulton (josh.boulton@btc.co.uk) Production Manager: Abby Penn (abby.penn@btc.co.uk) Design/Layout: Ian Collis ian.collis@btc.co.uk Circulation/Subscriptions: Christina Willis (christina.willis@btc.co.uk) Publisher: John Jageurs john.jageurs@btc.co.uk Published by Barrow & Thompkins Connexion Ltd. 35 Station Square, Petts Wood, Kent BR5 1LZ Tel: +44 (0) 1689 616 000 Fax: +44 (0) 1689 82 66 22 SUBSCRIPTIONS: UK £35/year, £60/two years, £80/three years; Europe: £48/year, £85 two years, £127/three years; R.O.W. £62/year £115/two years, £168/three years. Single copies can be bought for £8.50 (includes postage & packaging). Published 6 times a year. © <strong>2022</strong> Barrow & Thompkins Connexion Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of the magazine may be reproduced, without prior consent in writing, from the publisher For more magazines from BTC, please visit: www.btc.co.uk Articles published reflect the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily those of the publisher or his employees. While every reasonable effort is made to ensure that the contents of editorial and advertising are accurate, no responsibility can be accepted by the publisher for errors, misrepresentations or any resulting effects Comment Future ITERations by David Chadwick If you think our recent weather was hot then consider the ITER project that has been running in France for the last five years, and which still has some time to run, to construct the world's largest dedicated fusion reactor. The 30m tall structure is projected to hold plasma - the ionized gas consisting of positive ions and free electrons you will find at low pressures in fluorescent lamps or at very high temperatures in nuclear fusion reactors. It does so at temperatures 10 times that of the centre of the sun - 150.million degrees. In current tokamak (the term refers to its design) magnetic fusion experiments, insufficient fusion energy is produced to maintain the plasma temperature, and constant external heating must be supplied, but for every 50MW of power put into it, the plasma will produce 500MW of fusion power for periods up to 400 to 600 seconds - a tenfold return on energy expenditure. The current record for fusion power gain in a tokamak is Q = 0.67 held by the European JET facility located in Culham, UK, which produced 16 MW of thermal fusion power for 24 MW of injected heating power in the 1990s. The ITER Tokamak will be the largest ever built, with a plasma volume of 830 cubic metres. ITER's huge plasma volume will enable it to produce, for the first time, a "burning plasma" in which the majority of the heating needed to sustain the fusion reaction is produced by the alpha particles generated during the fusion process itself. The production and control of such a self-heated plasma has been the goal of magnetic fusion research for more than 50 years. The facts and figures surrounding ITER are mind-blowing, and you really should visit the website, ITER.org. The cost will make you wince, but the ultimate benefits are also staggering, as the fusion process is totally different to fissionbased power generation systems, with their short lives and the problem of disposing harmful expended radioactive isotopes. If the process to build a selfgenerating or heating process is successful it points the way to unlimited and relatively free energy once the construction costs have been absorbed. The ITER project is truly an international one with 35 countries involved, producing such things as the 100,000 kilometres of niobium-tin (Nb3Sn) superconducting strands to make ITER's toroidal field magnets, which were fabricated by suppliers in six ITER Domestic Agencies: China, Europe, Japan, Korea, Russia and the USA. Current minor problems aside, production of this started in 2009 and was completed by 2014. Why am I writing about this here? It strikes me that the heart of the current energy crisis is providing the hope that future energy supplies are well and truly on the agenda, with the promise of major innovations solving some of the problems we have and enabling us to move away from carbon-based energy sources. It also forms the subject of a Bentley case study, where they are developing and testing the use of digital simulations in the form of virtual, augmented, mixed and now extended reality, using the resources of NVIDIA's CloudXR platform. The issues that have had to be resolved in the process have extended Bentley's digital simulation capabilities in all aspects, enabling them to formulate a philosophy for creating solutions across all areas and disciplines within the construction industry. They have termed this 'the Metaverse' and, unlike some meta-themed projects, are turning theory into 'réalité'. 4 <strong>Jul</strong>y/<strong>Aug</strong>ust <strong>2022</strong>
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