Ambient office = 106 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 121 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 22 nanosieverts per hour

Romaine lettuce from Central Market = 66 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 92 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
     The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is a huge international project to construct a prototype tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. A group of countries are providing technology and expertise to construct what has been called the biggest and most complex international science experiment in history. ITER began construction of infrastructure in Cadarache, France in 2013. The construction of the actual tokamak began in 2020. ITER was supposed to go into operation in 2025. The current estimated date of initial operation of the ITER is now 2035. It is just intended to demonstration stable fusion and will not generate any electricity.
       The original budget for ITER was estimated at just under seven billion dollars. The current estimate is around twenty-three billion dollars. Some estimates are as high as sixty five billion dollars but that is strongly disputed by the ITER administrators.
     The reactor core will be assembled from nine huge vacuum vessel sections which each weight four hundred and forty tons of steel. Two vacuum vessel sections have been delivered to the site. The first section was scheduled to be lowered into the tokamak chamber, also known as the tokamak pit in December of 2021.
      The ASN learned about damage to the delivered sections during an inspection on July 2nd, 2021 and reported it to Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the ITER organization on July 20th, 2021. Since then, the ITER organization has submitted repeated requests to the ASN to allow the ITER organization to proceed with the installation of the damaged sections with an alternative method.
     In November of 2021, it was reported in the press that both of the vacuum vessel sections that had been delivered the ITER site were damaged during manufacture. The details of the damage are unclear. Either the sections or parts of the sections fell at the manufacturing site. This caused dimension distortion according to the French nuclear safety authority Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN).
     As a result of the dimensional distortions of the vacuum vessel sections, the subassembly of these section cannot be carried out as planned in the spacious assembly hall. Instead, it has been proposed that the subassembly of the damaged sections be performed inside the confined space where the final assembly of the reactor core will take place.
     If the damaged sections cannot be welded together correctly, the reactor could release excessive radiation during operation. Gamma-ray radiation and neutrons that will be released during the operation of ITER will require proper cojoining of the nine vacuum vessel to protect workers near the reactor.
     Evangelia Petit is the press officer for the ASN. She has explained that the ASN is not willing to compromise its safety standards. “The specifications provided are not sufficient to demonstrate and guarantee compliance with the requirements, specifically concerning a) radiological protection material and [its] impact on the total weight of the tokamak and b) welding and related controls of the vacuum vessel sectors, given the existence of dimensional non-conformance. In order to go forward, we have requested IO to provide us with a consolidated design, carefully reviewed in order to check [compliance with] all safety and radiological protection criteria.”
Please read Part 2 next

Ambient office = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 120 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 120 nanosieverts per hour

Red bell pepper from Central Market = 109 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 83 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 107 nanosieverts per hour

Pineapple from Central Market = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 96 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 107 nanosieverts per hour

Iceberg lettuce from Central Market = 112 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 95 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 84 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole = 101 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     The DeepMind AI was able to autonomously learn how to create these plasma shapes by manipulating the magnetic coils both in the simulation and in the real tokamak. Fasoli says that this represents a “significant step.” It could influence the design of future tokamaks or even speed up the journey to viable fusion reactors. Yasmin Andrew is a fusion specialist at Imperial College London who is not involved in the DeepMind project. He said, “It will be interesting to see if they can transfer the technology to a larger tokamak.”
      The study of nuclear fusion offered a particular challenge to DeepMind’s scientists because the process is both complex and continuous. Unlike turn-based games like Go and Chess, the state of a plasma changes constantly. To make things even more difficult, plasmas cannot be continuously measured. This is called an “under-observed system.”
      Jonas Buchli is a research scientist at DeepMind. He said, “Sometimes algorithms which are good at these discrete problems struggle with such continuous problems. This was a really big step forward for our algorithm, because we could show that this is doable. And we think this is definitely a very, very complex problem to be solved. It is a different kind of complexity than what you have in games.”
     This is not the first time that researchers have tried to control nuclear fusion with artificial intelligence. Since 2014, Google has been collaborating with fusion company TAE Technologies to apply machine learning to a different type of fusion reactor in order to speed up the analysis of experimental data. Researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion project in the U.K. have used AI to try to predict the behavior of plasma.
     All in all, the collaboration of the Swiss Plasma Center with DeepMind could prove critical as fusion reactors get bigger. Physicists have a good grasp on how to control the plasma in smaller-scale tokamaks with conventional methods. The challenges will only increase as scientists try to make power-plant-sized versions viable. Progress has been slow but steady. Last week, the JET project made a breakthrough. It set a new record for the amount of energy extracted from a fusion project. Work continues on the ITER project in France. It will be the world’s largest experimental fusion reactor when it goes operational in 2025.
     Dmitri Orlov is an associate research scientist at the Center for Energy Research in San Diego. He said, “The more complex and high performance the tokamak, the greater the need to control more quantities with higher and higher reliability and accuracy. An AI-controlled tokamak could be optimized to control the transfer of heat out of the reaction to the walls of the containment vessel and prevent damaging “plasma instability”. The reactors could be redesigned to take advantage of the tighter control offered by the reinforcement learning.
     Fasoli says that the collaboration with DeepMind could allow fusion researchers to push the boundaries and accelerate the long journey towards fusion power. He said, “AI would enable us to explore things that we wouldn’t explore otherwise, because we can take risks with this kind of control system we wouldn’t dare take otherwise. If we are sure that we have a control system that can take us close to the limit but not beyond the limit, we can actually explore possibilities that wouldn’t otherwise be there for exploring.”