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Tag archives: energy
The STAR of the show
Grand designs. (courtesy: Applied Fusion Systems)
By Michael Banks
You may remember in 2014 when we reported that entrepreneur Richard Dinan – a former star of the UK reality-TV programme Made in Chelsea – was venturing into fusion energy.
He founded the firm Applied Fusion Systems with the aim of building a prototype fusion reactor. The 30 year old, who doesn’t have a university degree, claims to have taught himself tokamak design and employs a small team of scientists who are working on a design.
Well, the firm has now released its first blueprint for a spherical fusion tokamak and is seeking £200m in investment to build not one, but two of the machines.
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Juan Morante: an energetic man
By Matin Durrani
Juan Morante, who’s boss of the Catalonian Institute for Energy Research (IREC), visited the headquarters of IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World, late last year. Morante has also just taken up the reins as the new editor-in-chief of the Journal of Physics D and was here to discuss everything about the journal, from commissioning and peer review to design and marketing.
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Female astronomers through the ages, science-inspired phone cases and the return of the incandescent light bulb
Women and the RAS: portraits of 21 leading astronomers. (Courtesy: Maria Platt-Evans)
By Hamish Johnston
The first documented female astronomer in Britain was Margaret Flamsteed (1670–1739), who worked with her husband John at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. That’s according to astronomer Mandy Bailey of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society, who has written an article entitled “Women and the RAS: 100 years of Fellowship”. As the title suggests, this year is the centenary of the first women becoming fellows of the RAS.
To celebrate the centenary, the RAS commissioned Maria Platt-Evans to photograph 21 leading female fellows. The portraits appear above and are also presented in the slide show “Women of the Royal Astronomical Society”, which includes short biographies.
Preparing for DEMO
Laying the groundwork: engineers are rebuilding the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak. (Courtesy: Michael Banks)
By Michael Banks
Yesterday I took the train from Bristol and headed to the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) in Oxfordshire.
Owned and operated by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, the CCFE is already home to the Joint European Torus (JET) tokamak, which in 2011 underwent a £60m upgrade programme that involved replacing the carbon tiles in the inner reactor wall with beryllium and tungsten. The purpose of this retrofit was to test the materials that are to be used in the ITER fusion experiment, which is currently being built in Cadarache, France.
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