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  • About
  • Photography
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    • ITER The Machine
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    • Real Food
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    • Covid2 Hospital, Rome
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The Machine

Nuclear fusion, the physical reaction that powers the stars, is a possible safe and potentially unlimited source of energy and the construction of industrial plants to produce electricity from an artificial sun is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time. In Saint-Paul-lès-Durance in the south of France, 35 nations are collaborating to build ITER, the largest tokamak in the world, a magnetic fusion reactor designed to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale energy source with no carbon emissions. The Iter reactor is funded by the European Union, the United States, Russia, China, India, Japan and South Korea, and is now one of the most ambitious energy projects in the world aiming to harness the energy of the sun to help solve many of the problems related to the sustainability of life on Earth.

In a workshop technicians is assembling the sections of the cryostat at Iter worksite at Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, France. Cryostat is a huge vacuum containment vessel and provides the high vacuum, ultra-cool environment for the vacuum vessel and the superconducting magnets.
On the upper dome of the Iter cryostat, Céline Madec, 36, during her shift.
Inside the Iter cryostat, Robert Sonnleitner, 31, covers his shift.

In stars, hydrogen fuses into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy. The construction of The Machine (as the Iter scientists call their project) is taking place in the countryside of Provence, but San Paul les Durance is not the only privileged location of this gigantic energy project.
Italian research in the field of fusion plays a decisive role in this global initiative. In a hangar of 18,000 square meters in the territorial area of the National Research Council of Padua, two prototypes are being built for the external heating of the Iter plasma: the “Mitica” and “Spider” experiments, the first one with a neutral particle injector, one source of negative ions the second.
The Neutral Beam Test Facility (NBTF) is located in the premises of the RFX Consortium, an Italian research laboratory that has been studying plasma physics and controlled nuclear fusion since 1996. The components made in the Padua test facility will be reproduced in France: the outcome experiments conducted in Italy will offer scientists the opportunity to investigate challenging physical and technological problems and validate concepts before the system is installed on Iter.

Tourists visiting Iter workspaces take pictures of the Poloidal field coils workshop.
The Assembly Building is the location for pre-assembly activities on the massive components of the ITER device before they are transported to the Tokamak complex for installation.
In the assembly hall engineers are working on the second vacuum vessel sub-assembly. The vacuum vessel provides a high-vacuum environment for the plasma, improves radiation shielding and plasma stability, acts as the primary confinement barrier for radioactivity, and provides support for in-vessel components
In the assembly hall Stefan Vogel, 32, begins his shift on the elevator.

The scientific objective of the NBTF project is to develop a system to obtain a beam of high energy (1MeV) and power (16.5 megawatts) negative ions that will be used to heat the plasma in the ITER reactor. These are performances never achieved until now, hence the need to create a laboratory where to design, build and test such a complex device.
The main heating system of ITER will consist of two neutral beam injectors (NBI), each with an energy of 1 MeV and a beam of negative Deuterium ions of 40 A, to provide the plasma with a power of approximately 16.5 MW per an hour. The required requirements have never been obtained experimentally, so it was decided to produce two prototypes to test the system in the Neutral Beam Test Facility installed in Padua: SPIDER, the most powerful negative ion source in the world and MITICA the prototype in scale 1:1 of the ITER injector, capable of operating at full power and voltage.
The Neutral Beam Test Facility will offer scientists the opportunity to investigate challenging physical and technological issues and validate concepts before the neutral beam system is installed on ITER.

An electrical substation on the ITER site. The entire ITER site is independently powered from an electrical substation that draws power directly from the four hundred thousand volt (400 kV) national electrical grid. Electricity requirements for the ITER plant and facilities will range from 110 MW to up to 620 MW for peak periods of 30 seconds during plasma operation.
Valentina Nikolaeva, 31, researcher in the In-Vessel Diagnostics section, watches the progress of the work on the external Iter site. «I have deep gratitude for the opportunity to be a part of the largest fusion project in the world. For me it is a very inspiring and enriching experience to work together with the greatest scientists, researchers and engineers. A work on ITER-related projects require a high level of responsibility and active communication among different teams in a clear and timely manner, in order to meet deadlines and work standards»
Pétanque players in the town hall square of Saint-Paul-lès-Durance. This small town in the Bouches-du-Rhône department in Provence with just under a thousand inhabitants is the site of the largest nuclear fusion project in the world.
A technician places a retroreflective target used by the measurement system. The assembly of the Iter reactor requires a wide range of metrological systems such as laser trackers, total stations and photogrammetry to ensure the correct alignment of the individual components.

Mitica is the acronym for Megavolt Iter Injector and Concept Advancement, a life-size prototype of a heating neutral particle injector. It is an impressive device capable of heating Iter’s plasma through the input of millions of watts of power through the injection of neutral particles.
Plasma heating occurs when a particle beam penetrates its interior and, by collision with those it encounters, transfers the energy to the plasma itself, increasing its temperature.
The fuel used to generate the plasma in fusion reactors is a deuterium-tritium gas, both isotopes of hydrogen, the most widespread element in the universe. In order for it to reach the plasma state and the fusion reaction to take place, the temperatures inside the reactor must reach 150 million degrees Celsius, ten times those of the sun’s core. Iter’s tokamak will rely on three external heating sources similar to Mitica that will work in concert to provide the input power needed to bring the plasma to melting temperature.

In a workshop a technician performs a weld on the external shield of the cryostat.
In the tokamak assembly hall, Pieluigi Veltri, 38, physicist, during his shift. «In such complex projects as the Iter reactor, sharing of knowledge is essential. Studies in the field of fusion conducted so far suggest that this is a line of research that needs the sharing of information rather than the action of the individual researcher. To reach our final goal, we advance slowly, thanks to small insights that come from hundreds of researchers around the world».
The 1 MV High Voltage Deck of the MITICA experiment, the prototype of the ITER neutral injector at the NBTF in Padua, Italy. Mitica is designed to produce a beam of neutral particles starting from negative ions of hydrogen and deuterium, accelerated to an energy of 1 MeV at a power of 16.5 MW for a duration of one hour.
The SPIDER experiment (Source for Production of Ion of Deuterium Extracted from Rf Plasm) during the maintenance work at the NBTF in Padua, Italy. Spider is the most powerful negative ion source in the world. To heat the plasma of future fusion reactors, millions of watts of power can be input using neutral particle injection.

About two hundred people work in the Paduan factory of the stars, including researchers, physicists, engineers and technical personnel, divided between Mitica and Spider (Source for the Production of Ions of Deuterium Extracted from a Radio frequency plasma), the largest source of negative ions in the world entered into operation for the first time in 2018. This device consists of a particle extraction and acceleration system consisting of a series of three electrode grids, each with 1280 perfectly calibrated holes, through which the negative particles generated in the plasma they are extracted and subsequently accelerated.

It is fascinating to be able to observe the passion and energy of the teams at work in France and Italy. In these centers of excellence the teams of researchers work tirelessly to build enormous machines to generate, extract and accelerate portions of matter of subatomic dimension: invisible, imperceptible, inconsistent. Yet measuring, calculating and interpreting this invisibility of matter is decisive for the progress of the experiments and for responding to the energy urgency that animates the colossal Iter project.

Barbara Zaniol, nuclear physicist, under the vacuum chamber of the Spider experiment in the NBTF of Padua, Italy.
The Tokamak pit. The reactor will be contained within the seismic isolation pit, a 17 meter deep and 90 x 130 meter cavity in the ITER platform excavated to house the concrete base, retaining walls and seismic plates that will protect the buildings and equipment in the custody of a seismic event.
Chinese technicians working their shift inside the Tokamak pit.
Inside the tokamak hall Hani-Salah Gagueche, 41, cover his shift.
The cooling system of the SPIDER and MITICA projects is located in an entire building of the NBTF in Padua and is capable of dissipating up to 70 MW of power.
Caterina Cavallini, chemical engineer, analyzes the water purity of Spider's first cooling system inside the NBTF in Padua, Italy.
Isabella Mario, nuclear physicist, during the manipulation of a spectroscopic diagnostic to analyze the intensity and energy of the negative ion beam generated by SPIDER at the NBTF of Padua, Italy.
Rita Sabrina Delogu, mechanical engineer, collects the data of the STRIKE calorimeter, the main diagnostic system of SPIDER at the NBTF in Padua. The measurement system is designed to characterize, in terms of uniformity and divergence, the negative ion beam and to understand the heat emanating from the SPIDER beam.
The sunset on the construction site of the Iter project in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France.

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