Powering the nuclear family: Basque firm develops two energy sources for Europe’s experimental nuclear fusion reactor (September 3, 2004) |
ITER, currently the world’s largest nuclear fusion research project, is linked to the Basque Country through local firm JEMA. With just 70 employees on its books, JEMA celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2003 by getting involved in one of its most ambitious projects ever, involving two power supply units designed and manufactured at the company’s production facilities for the experimental European nuclear fusion reactor at Culham in the United Kingdom. The reactor was one of several used in the definition of the international experimental nuclear fusion project ITER, for which France and Canada are in the running to host, now the Spanish claim, among others, has been rejected.
JEMA was awarded the contract to make the supply units by the European Commission through the European Fusion Development Agreement, EFDA, after fierce competition with major multinationals in the sector, like Siemens, ABB and Alston. “JEMA got the job”, says company Marketing director Juan Otegi, “thanks to its 25-plus years of international experience in the development of special electric power supply sources for nuclear physics and particle research labs.”
Starting work on the two power source units was the latest step in two and a half years of work, “which” as Otegi explains, “involved some really tough research, design and construction work on equipment that is at the very limit of what the latest cutting-edge technology is capable of making.”
In Otegi’s view, the main challenge in this kind of à la carte project is that there are no precedents. “Although you start from a series of technologies that have already been developed, the kind of configurations involved simply haven’t been used before. ”
Two and a half years eventually led to the two power supply source units, capable of generating 20 million watts each, roughly 10 per cent of the energy produced at the nearby conventional thermal power station at Pasajes.
With each unit measuring roughly 400 square metres, nine special transport lorries were required to get them to the UK.
Otegi described the project as the firm’s most important challenge of the last ten years, although this isn’t the only such project JEMA has been involved with. In 2003 the company developed a power source prototype for the LHC experiment, the world’s largest particle accelerator, now under construction at the European Nuclear Research Centre in Geneva. Otegi describes the accelerator, part of a project scheduled to be up and running in 2007, as a “tube installed 100 metres deep in a 27-kilometre-long tunnel.”
Summary of a news item published in El Diario Vasco, 9 February, 2004 |
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