Putting the sun in a box at ITER

Séminaire Fédération

Richard Pitts

Dr Richard Pitts is currently leader of the Divertor Physics and Plasma-Wall Interactions Section inside the Science and Operations Department of the ITER Organization.

Résumé: Starting with an introduction to the basics of the terrestrial fusion reaction between the light hydrogen isotopes and the tokamak principle, the presentation will try to explain why the ITER device must be as large as it is and describe the main physics and technology goals of the project which, despite being a forerunner to any possible next step reactor, remains fundamentally an experiment. It will produce no electricity for the grid and will operate only in comparatively short pulses (around 10 minutes in the first years of exploitation and ultimately up to about one hour), but will bring together in a single machine all that we have learned in more than 70 years of R&D on the tokamak concept, both from the physics and engineering perspectives. The presentation will try to convey the scale of the project through illustrative examples of the major components constituting the tokamak core, and give a flavour of the infrastructure required for this massive undertaking. Some of the main challenges facing tokamak operation at the ITER scale will also be discussed.

Dr Richard Pitts is currently leader of the Divertor Physics and Plasma-Wall Interactions Section inside the Science and Operations Department of the ITER Organization. He was awarded a Phd from the Univ. of London in 1990 for work performed on the DITE tokamak at the UK Atomic Energy Agency, Culham, Oxfordshire. He then worked for a year on the JET tokamak, including periods on the TEXTOR tokamak at FZ Juelich, Germany, before taking up a position at the Plasma Physics Research Centre (CRPP) at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. After 16 years working on the Swiss tokamak, TCV, including several years leading experimental task forces back at JET, he left in 2008 to take up his current post at ITER. He has published more than 200 papers in the field of fusion plasma physics and worked with almost all of the world’s major tokamak facilities"