Energy: 450 leading experts on fusion gathered in Rome

At the start an Italian-made mega-project harnessing energy from stars.

450 worldwide leading experts on nuclear fusion met to discuss the breakthroughs on the path to re-creating stars on earth to provide limitless, safe and clean energy and meet the planet’s growing energy demand.

The event was organized by ENEA, the Italian Agency for New technologies, Energy and the Environment, a leading member of the international programs ITER, DEMO, Broader Approach and the UE Agency Fusion for Energy (F4E), facing the tremendous fusion engineering challenge.

The ENEA Frascati Research Center, a global hub of excellence also visited by Bill Gates, is the national coordinator for the project ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), the fusion reactor currently being built in Cadarache, France.

The scientific and economic impacts are significant: as of today, the Italian companies manufacturing components for the nuclear fusion sector (including Ansaldo nucleare, ASD superconductors, Walter Tosto and SIMIC) have secured contracts worth over 1 billion euro, equivalent to almost 60% worth of european contracts for manufacturing of high-tech components.  And the objective is  generating new contracts worth millions of euro over the next five years.

But the great challenge for our Country is securing a 500 million euro UE project for the construction of an experimental device,  the DTT (Divertor Test Tokamak) in Italy, to be developed jointly with the CNR, the IFN, CREATE (Research Consortium for Energy, Automation and Electromagnetic Technologies) and many among the most prestigious Italian Universities, to provide crucial scientific, technical and technological solutions in the innovative energy sources sector.

The Italian Government has included the project, a milestone in the road map to nuclear fusion, among the initiatives to be financed with the funds destined to competitivity recently activated by the “Juncker Plan”. “The Italian-made DTT –Aldo Pizzuto, Head of the Fusion Department at ENEA, explained- would be one of the most important scientific laboratories in the world after the one at ITER, involving over 250 among researchers and technicians, boosting the national industry sector, with a significant impact on jobs and competitiveness.

The Italian - made technology of the DTT would be the same used for ITER, with the additional possibility of carrying out tests with advanced materials, employing a technique patented by ENEA. The objective is to test innovative solutions aimed at tackling one of the major issues in the fusion process, the energy disposal in fusion reactors, also the focus of the Rome event.

Although in the past Italy has hosted major events on the subject matter of fusion energy, this is the first time the International Conference on Plasma Surface Interactions in Controlled Fusion Devices , now at its 22th edition, is taking place in Rome.

“The fact that the Conference on plasma is taking place in Italy for the first time is an important acknowledgement by the international scientific community of the advancements and significant results we have obtained. An important step forward in the development of the DTT in our Country” ENEA researcher Giorgio Maddaluno pointed out.

“DTT is the link between ITER, the world’s largest fusion experiment aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of obtaining plasma able to sustain a fusion reaction and DEMO, the experimental facility whose main objective is generating electricity from fusion energy by 2050” ENEA researcher Flavio Crisanti pointed out.

ENEA has had a leading role in research on nuclear fusion since the 60’s and has been actively involved in the creation of ITER, contributing to the development of physical scenarios and the design of systems and components for diagnostics and plasma heating.

ENEA’s activities, initially dedicated mostly to plasma physics, have evolved towards a complex physics, technology and engineering  system in which  the Agency is the leading actor and coordinator of the national programme.

ENEA website on nuclear fusion: www.fusione.enea.it/WHAT/index.html.en