Poway’s General Atomics begins superconductor magnet work

Friday marked a significant new chapter for General Atomics in Poway, as the company officially began production of a new superconductor magnet.

Once completed, the 1,000 ton superconducting electromagnet will be used as part of the ITER experimental fusion energy experiment, which will be conducted in France. ITER is a partnership between several countries with the ultimate goal of demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy. Countries involved in ITER, which will take place in St. Paul-lez-Durance, France, include the United States, China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea and the Russian Federation.

Fusion energy is the energy source that powers the sun and other stars. ITER hopes to prove that it will be possible to one day reproduce this energy for use by humanity by creating a burning plasma on a reactor-scale, which has never been done before. If one day made feasible, fusion energy would provide a clean energy source that does not create long-term waste products or carry meltdown risks, like nuclear energy currently does.

“We’re bringing a star to Earth,” said Dr. Ned Sauthoff, the director of ITER’s United States project office. “That’s really something.”

General Atomics is working on the central solenoid for the ITER project, which is being called the “heart” of the fusion energy project. It is a stack of six 120-ton magnets that will drive 15 million amperes of electrical current in ITER’s fusion plasma, to stabilize it.

Each magnet coil will be 7 feet tall and 14 feet wide, made up of 4 miles of coiled superconducting cable, which was manufactured in Japan. Workers at the General Atomics Magnet Technologies Center in the Poway Business Park will spend the next four years winding, heating, insulating, encapsulating and testing seven coils (the six required for the ITER project, plus an extra just in case), which will be shipped to France and assembled into one big magnet there at the ITER facility.

Each coil will take about two years to complete, but General Atomics will finish all seven by 2019 thanks to having several winding machines and staggering the starts of each coil.

When the coils are finished, each will be heated for about a month at high temperatures to fuse the base materials into strands of superconducting alloy. When that’s finished, the coils will be insulated with three layers of insulation tape, then placed into a mold and heated and injected with resin to encapsulate it.

Once all this is finished, General Atomics will test the coils by cooling them to 4 degrees Kelvin (-450 degrees Fahrenheit and running them at full current, 50,000 amps, to simulate how they will run in ITER’s machine.

Once shipped to France, the ITER facility will need to assemble all the parts, then conduct testing, before the true test can begin. Sauthoff said that everything would be put together and operational by 2025.

Neal Blue, the CEO and chairman of General Atomics, called the magnet the most powerful magnet in the world. “This will become the heartbeat of the project,” said Blue.

Publicity released in advance of Friday’s media event said the electromagnet will be powerful enough to lift an aircraft carrier out of the water.