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Sunday, April 21, 2024

Boston cannabis dispensary opens its doors on 4/20, adds to growing industry

Daniel Coates
Sun, April 21, 2024

On the unofficial holiday of 4/20, another dispensary opened its doors to new customers – part of the booming statewide cannabis industry.

Rebelle on Albany Street in Boston is the first dispensary to open in the South End neighborhood. The company produces its own marijuana products while also selling other brands as well.

Guillermo Erazo, assistant general manager of the store, told Boston 25 that their natural products focus on general wellness.

“We produce our own product,” said Erazo. “We cultivate our own flower. We cultivate our own edibles and concentrates as well too.”

Rebelle is now one of more than a dozen dispensaries across Boston that sell recreational marijuana.

Recreational marijuana was legalized in Massachusetts in 2016. The cannabis control commission reported roughly $1.5 billion in sales in 2023 as the industry grows statewide.

Erazo added, “We have a lot of consumers who came down that are more happy that it’s recreational, that we open up doors for consumers to get it the correct way.”

The growing industry is also opening new doors for local businesses.

Sam Burgess of Bootstrap Compost in Everett held a pop-up at the South End dispensary, saying his company can create a more sustainable marijuana industry.

“We can actually compost green material after the harvesting,” said Burgess. “We can create bioplastics and whatnot for better packaging. So, I think there’s a lot of room for improvement.”

While dozens trickled into the store, Erazo told Boston 25 he hopes cannabis will soon be totally destigmatized.

Citing some benefits, Erazo finished, “Lupis, muscle relaxation, or an increase in appetite too.”

Since retail stores opened in 2018, the cannabis control commission has reported roughly $6 billion in sales

4/20 is the busiest time of year for Florida’s medical marijuana dispensaries

Ivy Nyayieka, Tampa Bay Times
Sat, April 20, 2024

It’s April 20 (or 4/20) — the unofficial holiday celebrating marijuana.

And if history is any indicator, it’s a great day for sales at Florida’s medical pot dispensaries.

In the past two years, Floridians with medical marijuana cards bought more weed during the week of 4/20 than any other week of the year. That’s according to a Times analysis of cannabis dispensary data from the state’s Office of Medical Marijuana Use. (420 is slang for pot smoking; its origins are debated.)

Steve Mazeika, the vice president of communications at Verano, the parent company of cannabis dispensary chain Müv, called April 20 “the cannabis community’s biggest annual holiday.”

Cannabis market research firm BDSA, which is based in Colorado, said in an email that the higher sales are likely due to “the overall hype surrounding the holiday” as well as increased marketing that cannabis dispensaries do around this time of year. It said revenues reached $23.26 million in Florida on April 20 last year.

“Despite being a medical market, the use of cannabis in Florida for relaxation and recreation-adjacent purposes is significant,” said BDSA chief executive officer Roy Bingham.

Florida only allows weed use for those with medical marijuana cards. But voters in November will decide on a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow recreational marijuana for adults in the state.

In 2023, nearly 440 million mg of medical marijuana was dispensed during the week of April 20, a 31% increase compared to 2022, according to state data.

The state saw a 14% growth in the number of medical marijuana patients in that period.

Florida’s not alone. Other states, including Arkansas and Colorado, have in the past reported bumps in medical marijuana sales around April 20, according to news reports.

420 fest draws crowds for cannabis celebration in Chaparral, New Mexico

Corrie Boudreaux
Sun, April 21, 2024

Several hundred people gathered at an empty lot between two tiny strip malls along County Line Road in Chaparral, New Mexico, for a 420 celebration.

GT 420 Music Fest, organized by James and Christina Perez, owners of GT Dispensary in Chaparral, featured an all-day lineup of bands in English and Spanish and finished with an appearance by California hip-hop rap artist Lil Rob.

Hip-hop and rap artist Lil Rob entertain spectators on Saturday at the GT 420 Music Fest in Chaparral, New Mexico.

Though one myth has it that 420, 4/20 or 4:20 originates from a police code for marijuana, the true story is that a group of teenagers in 1970s California used “4:20” to allude to the time when they would meet after school to smoke. The term spread after it was used on a flyer distributed at a Grateful Dead concert in the early 90s, USA TODAY reported. Now, April 20 is known worldwide as a day to celebrate all things cannabis-related.

The dispensary owners wanted to give back to the community, so they decided to organize the free family-friendly event, they said.

James Perez, organizer of the GT 420 Music Fest in Chaparral, N.M., speaks to the crowd of spectators on April 20, 2024. The free event was organized by James and his wife, Christina Perez, owner of GT Dispensary, because they want to educate the public on the myriad uses of cannabis.

The introduction of New Mexico's cannabis industry to El Paso has facilitated easy access to legal cannabis, and dispensaries consistently attract a significant share of their customers from nearby El Paso.

James Perez uses it for medicinal purposes, but in the past, he had to travel from Chaparral to Las Cruces or Sunland Park to buy it. He and his wife decided to open their own dispensary in 2022 to provide marijuana for their community.

James Perez said that he and his wife want to prove that cannabis is far more useful than the popular stereotype of its recreational use might suggest.

Vintage cars are part of the show as spectators enjoy music, food, and cannabis-themed merchandise at the GT 420 Music Fest in Chaparral, New Mexico, on Saturday, April 20.

“Cannabis is a blessing because it’s medication,” Perez said. “We have customers in wheelchairs, customers with cancer. It can do so much for the body. I’d love for people to see it as medication.”

El Paso law enforcement, however, continues to enforce Texas marijuana laws. Both the city of El Paso and El Paso County have created programs to issue citations for people caught with low-level possession of marijuana. The citations can carry a hefty $500 fine.

Spectators enjoy music, food, and cannabis-themed merchandise at the GT 420 Music Fest in Chaparral, New Mexico.

Hip-hop rap artist Lil Rob performs at the GT 420 Music Fest on Saturday, April 20, in Chaparral, New Mexico.

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: 420 fest draws crowds for cannabis celebration in New Mexico

Cherokee Street transforms for St. Louis’ annual 420 bash

Liz Dowell
Fri, April 19, 2024

ST. LOUIS — This weekend marks a special celebration for cannabis enthusiasts. April 20th, known as “420,” has its roots in the 1970s as a term for cannabis consumption. It was coined by a group of school friends who regularly convened at 4:20 to partake in smoking sessions.

Over the years, the term has evolved into a cultural phenomenon, especially as cannabis legalization has taken hold in states like Missouri and its neighboring state, Illinois. As Missouri enters its second year of cannabis legality, St. Louis gears up to commemorate 420 with a series of city-wide events.

The festivities kick off with the Green Light District Festival on April 19th, running from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Cola Private Lounge on Cherokee Street. The opening act features a comedy show with food available for purchase. On April 20th and 21st, starting at noon, Cherokee Street will transform into a bustling hub of activity with a street crawl parade, vendors, live music, and more.

The mystery of the Des Peres Pickle Jar

Other celebrations in the area:

On 4/20, Steve’s Hotdogs will join the celebration with their Delta-9 THC-infused menu items during an event titled Steve’s 420: All Day Haze, running from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

The Loop 420 Street Fest returns for its second year, starting at 11 a.m. and running until 7 p.m. The event promises live music, glass blowing demonstrations, vendor booths, and much more.

The 4:20 STL Festival, held from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., boasts 30 cannabis vendors, games, live performances, and prizes for the first 100 attendees.

Taking place inside a movie theater, “Sesh at the Cinema” features 420-themed vendors, live entertainment, a smoke box, and giveaways from 1 to 6 p.m.

On April 21st, The Factory will host its 420 celebration, screening “The Big Lebowski” starting at 3:30 p.m. The event will also feature pop-ups from Missouri cannabis companies showcasing their products, along with a costume contest.

For those seeking an outdoor experience, the Lit ‘N’ Lost Cannabash 4/20 will take place at Lost Hill Lake in Saint Clair, MO. Attendees can enjoy games, live music, smoke sessions, vendor booths, and food trucks.

North Country welcomes first 4/20 celebrations at recreational cannabis dispensaries

Can I be fired for smoking weed in off-hours? Grow cannabis at home? California laws to know

Sarah Linn
Sat, April 20, 2024

Saturday marks a special holiday for fans of cannabis culture.

April 20, known as 4/20, is celebrated by marijuana enthusiasts across the globe.

Although cannabis use is legal in California, there are a number of laws in the Golden State governing how it can be cultivated and consumed.

Here’s a roundup of our latest cannabis-related coverage:

A man takes a picture of one the cannabis plants on display at the first Cannabis Awards and Exhibit at the California State Fair during media day on Wednesday, July 13, 2022. Hector Amezcua/hamezcua@sacbee.com
Can I grow cannabis at home?

Passed by California voters in 2016, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act allows adults 21 and older to legally grow, possess and use cannabis for recreational use.

You can grow up to six plants at your California residence for personal use only.

Plus, those cultivating cannabis at home can’t use volatile solvents — butane or propane — to process it, according to the California Department of Cannabis Control.

Breaking the rules about residential cannabis cultivation can result in a fine or imprisonment.

READ MORE:

Want to grow weed in your California home? Don’t break the law — but follow these tips
Can I get fired for smoking weed in my off-hours?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2188 into law in 2022, banning employers from firing, penalizing or creating employment conditions for workers based on cannabis use off the job or away from the workplace.

The law went into effect on Jan. 1.

However, it only applies to some jobs.

READ MORE:

Can I be fired for smoking weed in my off-hours? What new California cannabis law says

Aaron Grove, right, owner of Elk Grove CBD, helps customer Ray Tamayo on Saturday, April 13, 2024. Elk Grove prohibits marijuana dispensaries from operating in the city limits. Lezlie Sterling/lsterling@sacbee.com

Marijuana sales are prohibited in Elk Grove. Would the city ever reconsider?
What’s the difference between edible cannabis and smoking weed?

Smoking marijuana and consuming cannabis-laced edibles can both lift your mood, but there are some key differences between the two.

Smoked or vaped marijuana enters the lungs and is absorbed into the bloodstream, according to cannabis education site Leafly, while edibles are processed in the stomach and liver.

That means edibles feel stronger and the effects will last a lot longer.

Smoking weed and ingesting cannabis also have varying effects on your health.

READ MORE:

Edible cannabis vs smoking weed: How are they different and what are the health effects?

Chandler Hale, a manager at All about Wellness in Sacramento holds some of the cannabis-infused edible gummies and fruit chews Tuesday, March 22, 2022. Hector Amezcua/hamezcua@sacbee.com

Cooking with cannabis? How edibles have changed

Since California legalized the recreational sale and use of cannabis, marijuana-infused food has become more creative and accessible.

Sacramento dispensaries sell everything from cannabis-injused hot sauce and buffalo jerky to weed lollipops, dulce de leche truffle bars and dark chocolate mocha malt balls.

Meanwhile, major beer brands such as Pabst, Lagunitas and Anheuser Busch-InBev offer flavored seltzers that are alcohol-free but include THC.

You can even cook with gourmet food with cannabis, experts say.

READ MORE:

Cooking with cannabis: How marijuana food edibles in Sacramento went to the next level

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Researchers uncover ways to improve railcar roller bearing safety, strength

by Karl Vogel, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

When Nebraska Engineering researchers began cooking up new recipes for manufacturing railcar bearing components, they expected there would be a few offerings that wouldn't be as satisfying.

However, rollers for a railroad tapered roller bearing produced using metal powders, a state-of-the-art 3D printing lab, and additive manufacturing processes proved to be just as robust as rollers made using currently conventional techniques.

Joseph Turner, Robert W. Brightfelt Professor of Mechanical Engineering, said the first-ever 3D-printed rollers for railroad bearings exceeded expectations, creating a starting point for expanding the use of this innovative process that could help to make transportation even safer. Their results were compiled into a paper—"Fatigue Performance of Bearing Rollers Manufactured by Laser Powder Bed Fusion"—that was published in Bearing and Transmission Steels Technology.

"We cooked up many different recipes and we printed many rollers," Turner said. "We expected the printed rollers to show failure early on in the tests, but the bottom line is they performed just as well as conventional rollers. Now, we're going to explore other ideas using this work as the foundation."

The team was led by Turner and recent mechanical engineering doctoral graduate Luz Sotelo. It also included former faculty member Michael Sealy, graduate students Cody Pratt, Guru Madireddy and Rakeshkumar Karunakaran, and industry partner Amsted Rail Brenco. The project also received support from the National Science Foundation and the Federal Railroad Administration. Sotelo was an NSF Graduate Fellow.

Turner said the team expected standard fatigue tests simulating the loads—up to 286,000 pounds per railcar over 250,000 miles traveled—would show the metal AM recipe for a printed bearing was in need of tweaking.

However, Turner said, the rollers printed in the College of Engineering's Nebraska Engineering Additive Technology Labs using 8620HC—a high-carbon steel—performed as well as those manufactured using current standard processes.

"Basically, when you look at the two types of rollers side by side, you can't see any difference in the look or their performance," Turner said. "A lot of times (in metal AM), you will have concerns about the porosity or the internal microstructure of the metals in the first printed objects. Our 3D-printed rollers held up to the demands of the loads and distance that are expected from the mass-produced bearings."

Typical railcar bearings have more than 40 rollers, which measure about 2 inches by ¾ of an inch, one bearing for each wheel, and a total of about 350 per railcar. The standard-use bearings, Turner said, are manufactured by cutting long loops of thick, steel wire into the required lengths and then grinding them down to create the tapers needed for optimal performance.

Using 3D printing to produce the rollers proved to be significantly more expensive than the current methods, Turner said. Despite that drawback, he said, the use of 3D printing could in the not-too-distant future find a place in many industries that use these types of bearings.

"You have to explore whether it's even possible before you can begin figuring out when it's cost effective," Turner said. "Setting up a production line that makes the bearings is a huge investment but, maybe, it can work in emergency situations—like a mining company in the outback of Australia has a failure that might otherwise hurt their ability to move their product. If they can 3D print a part and not have to wait for something to be shipped to them."

The next steps, Turner said, might also include looking at possible other ways to make 3D printing more financially sensible in the manufacturing process, such as using more expensive steel powders to create a coating on bearing components made from less expensive metals, to create an overall cheaper and more sturdy bearing with better properties.

"One of the things we in the NEAT Lab have become pretty proficient at is developing these new recipes for alloys," Turner said. "As prices for our ingredients and equipment continue to drop in price, we will be able to try rolling out some new things that could appeal to a lot of fields and industries."

More information: Luz D. Sotelo et al, Fatigue Performance of Bearing Rollers Manufactured by Laser Powder Bed Fusion, Bearing and Transmission Steels Technology (2024). DOI: 10.1520/STP164920220115

Provided by University of Nebraska-Lincoln Scientists propose anti-fatigue preparation for 3D-printed titanium alloy

Sunday, April 14, 2024

With inspiration from “Tetris,” MIT researchers develop a better radiation detector

The device, based on simple tetromino shapes, could determine the direction and distance of a radiation source, with fewer detector pixels

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

The spread of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in 2011 and the ongoing threat of a possible release of radiation from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex in the Ukrainian war zone have underscored the need for effective and reliable ways of detecting and monitoring radioactive isotopes. Less dramatically, everyday operations of nuclear reactors, mining and processing of uranium into fuel rods, and the disposal of spent nuclear fuel also require monitoring of radioisotope release.

Now, researchers at MIT and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have come up with a computational basis for designing very simple, streamlined versions of sensor setups that can pinpoint the direction of a distributed source of radiation. They also demonstrated that by moving that sensor around to get multiple readings, they can pinpoint the physical location of the source. The inspiration for their clever innovation came from a surprising source: the popular computer game “Tetris.”

The team’s findings, which could likely be generalized to detectors for other kinds of radiation, are described in a paper published in Nature Communications, by MIT professors Mingda Li, Lin-Wen Hu, Benoit Forget, and Gordon Kohse; graduate students Ryotaro Okabe and Shangjie Xue; research scientist Jayson Vavrek SM ’16, PhD ’19 at LBNL; and a number of others at MIT and Lawrence Berkeley.

Radiation is usually detected using semiconductor materials, such as cadmium zinc telluride, that produce an electrical response when struck by high-energy radiation such as gamma rays. But because radiation penetrates so readily through matter, it’s difficult to determine the direction that signal came from with simple counting. Geiger counters, for example, simply provide a click sound when receiving radiation, without resolving the energy or type, so finding a source requires moving around to try to find the maximum sound, similarly to how handheld metal detectors work. The process requires the user to move closer to the source of radiation, which can add risk.

To provide directional information from a stationary device without getting too close, researchers use an array of detector grids along with another grid called a mask, which imprints a pattern on the array that differs depending on the direction of the source. An algorithm interprets the different timings and intensities of signals received by each separate detector or pixel. This often leads to a complex design of detectors.

Typical detector arrays for sensing the direction of radiation sources are large and expensive and include at least 100 pixels in a 10 by 10 array. However, the group found that using as few as four pixels arranged in the tetromino shapes of the figures in the “Tetris” game can come close to matching the accuracy of the large, expensive systems. The key is proper computerized reconstruction of the angles of arrival of the rays, based on the times each sensor detects the signal and the relative intensity each one detects, as reconstructed through an AI-guided study of simulated systems.

Of the different configurations of four pixels the researchers tried — square, or S-, J- or T-shaped — they found through repeated experiments that the most precise results were provided by the S-shaped array. This array gave directional readings that were accurate to within about 1 degree, but all three of the irregular shapes performed better than the square. This approach, Li says, “was literally inspired by ‘Tetris.’”

Key to making the system work is placing an insulating material such as a lead sheet between the pixels to increase the contrast between radiation readings coming into the detector from different directions. The lead between the pixels in these simplified arrays serves the same function as the more elaborate shadow masks used in the larger-array systems. Less symmetrical arrangements, the team found, provide more useful information from a small array, explains Okabe, who is the lead author of the work.

“The merit of using a small detector is in terms of engineering costs,” he says. Not only are the individual detector elements expensive, typically made of cadmium-zinc-telluride, or CZT, but all of the interconnections carrying information from those pixels also become much more complex. “The smaller and simpler the detector is, the better it is in terms of applications,” adds Li.

While there have been other versions of simplified arrays for radiation detection, many are only effective if the radiation is coming from a single localized source. They can be confused by multiple sources or those that are spread out in space, while the “Tetris”-based version can handle these situations well, adds Xue, co-lead author of the work.

In a single-blind field test at the Berkeley Lab with a real cesium radiation source, led by Vavrek, where the researchers at MIT did not know the ground-truth source location, a test device was performed with high accuracy in finding the direction and distance to the source.

“Radiation mapping is of utmost importance to the nuclear industry, as it can help rapidly locate sources of radiation and keep everyone safe,” says co-author Forget, an MIT professor of nuclear engineering and head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering.

Vavrek, another co-lead-author, says that while in their study they focused on gamma-ray sources, he believes the computational tools they developed to extract directional information from the limited number of pixels are “much, much more general.” It isn’t restricted to certain wavelengths, it can also be used for neutrons, or even other forms of light, ultraviolet light, adds Hu, a senior scientist at MIT Nuclear Reactor Lab.

Additional research team members include Ryan Pavlovsky, Victor Negut, Brian Quiter, and Joshua Cates at Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory, and Jiankai Yu, Tongtong Liu, Stephanie Jegelka at MIT. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.

###

Written by David L. Chandler, MIT News

Paper: “Tetris-inspired detector with neural network for radiation mapping”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47338-w

JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-024-47338-w

ARTICLE TITLE

“Tetris-inspired detector with neural network for radiation mapping”

Friday, April 05, 2024

'Time for Justice in Alabama': Supermajority of Mercedes-Benz Workers File for UAW Vote

"We are standing up for every worker in Alabama," said one employee. "We're going to turn things around with this vote. We're going to end the Alabama discount."

United Auto Workers members are seen at a rally in 2023.
(Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

JULIA CONLEY
Apr 05, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

The alleged illegal union-busting that Mercedes-Benz autoworkers in Vance, Alabama accused the car company of in a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board has not weakened the resolve of pro-union employees, a supermajority of whom now support a union election, according to the United Auto Workers.

The union announced Friday that more than 5,000 workers at the company's nonunion plant have filed a petition with the NLRB in favor of an election, with the workers aiming for a vote by early May.

"It's time for change at Mercedes," said the UAW. "It's time for justice in Alabama. It's time for Mercedes workers to stand up. That's why Mercedes workers have filed for their vote to join the UAW, and to win a better life."

The announcement comes weeks after Volkswagen employees in Chattanooga, Tennessee filed for a union election that's expected to be held April 17-19.

Both union votes are the result of aggressive campaigning by the UAW, including union president Shawn Fain, in the wake of a historic "stand-up strike" that pushed the Big Three automakers to agree to new contracts for about 150,000 workers late last year.

After the victory, Fain announced the launch of the largest union organizing drive in U.S. history, aiming to welcome 150,000 workers at nonunion auto plants into the UAW.

Over 10,000 autoworkers in recent months have signed union cards, and the UAW said Friday that employees at more than two dozen facilities are also organizing.

Mercedes' two U.S. plants in Alabama and South Carolina are its only facilities in the world where workers are not represented by a union. Workers in Vance say they want better healthcare, retirement security, safety protocols, and paid sick days.

Jeremy Kimbrell, a measurement machine operator at Mercedes, said the union vote is part of an effort to ensure carmakers no longer view Alabama as a state where workers can be compensated unfairly.

"We are standing up for every worker in Alabama," said Kimbrell. "At Mercedes, at Hyundai, and at hundreds of other companies, Alabama workers have made billions of dollars for executives and shareholders, but we haven't gotten our fair share. We're going to turn things around with this vote. We're going to end the Alabama discount."

Moesha Chandler, an assembly team member, said her job has given her "serious problems with my shoulders and hands."

"We are voting for safer jobs at Mercedes," said Chandler. "When you're still in your 20s and your body is breaking down, that's not right. By winning our union, we'll have the power to make the work safer and more sustainable.

The UAW celebrated the news out of Vance by releasing a video showing a recent rally where Fain encouraged workers to support the union effort.

"You gotta believe you can win, that this job can be better, that your life will be better, and that those things are worth fighting for," Fain told the Mercedes workers. "That's why we stand up."

The growing pro-union movement across the South represents "huge stakes," said Lauren Kaori Gurley, a labor reporter for The Washington Post. The UAW has faced resistance from right-wing politicians across the South for decades as it has attempted to unionize factories.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, said Thursday that the UAW's efforts are a "threat from Detroit" that "has no interest in seeing the people of Alabama succeed."

Ivey's comments indicated that the governor "thinks so little of Alabama workers, that we're only good for cheap labor," Kimbrell told AL.com.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

SURPRIZE

Biden, Promising Corporate Tax Increases, Has Cut Taxes Overall

Jim Tankersley
Mon, March 25, 2024

President Joe Biden walks on stage during a visit to the Intel campus in Chandler, Ariz., March 20, 2024. (Tom Brenner/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden, amping up a populist pitch in his reelection campaign, has repeatedly said he would raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to make them pay their “fair share.”

Republicans say Biden has “an unquenchable thirst for taxing the American people.” His Republican opponent in the election, former President Donald Trump, said recently that Biden was “going to give you the greatest, biggest, ugliest tax hike in the history of our country.”

So it might come as a surprise that, in just over three years in office, Biden has cut taxes overall.

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The math is straightforward. An analysis prepared for The New York Times by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank that studies fiscal issues, shows that the tax cuts Biden has signed for individuals and corporations are larger than the tax increases he has imposed on big corporations and their shareholders.

The analysis estimates that the tax changes Biden has ushered into law will amount to a net cut of about $600 billion over four years and slightly more than that over a full decade.

“It’s reasonable to conclude from those numbers that the Biden tax policy hasn’t been some kind of radical tax-raising program,” said Benjamin R. Page, a senior fellow at the center and author of the analysis.

The analysis strictly looks at changes to taxes over the course of Biden’s presidency, including some direct benefits to people and businesses that flow through the tax code. It does not measure the effects of inflation or certain regulations, which Republicans sometimes label “tax hikes” since they can raise costs for companies and individuals.

It also does not measure the social or economic benefits of Biden’s spending policies, or of his regulatory efforts meant to help consumers, like cracking down on so-called junk fees and limiting the cost of insulin and other medication.

Instead, the analysis provides a comprehensive look at what Biden has done to the tax code, and how those policies add up.

It is clear by that measure that his record has not matched his own ambitions for taxing the rich and big companies — or Republicans’ attempts to caricature him as a tax-and-spend liberal.

That’s largely because Biden has struggled to pass his most ambitious tax-raising plans. “It’s what can be got through Congress and signed,” Page said. “They were subject to compromise.”

A White House spokesperson, Michael Kikukawa, said in an email that Biden was “proud to have cut taxes for the middle class and working families while cracking down on wealthy tax cheats and making big corporations pay more of their fair share.”

The president’s enacted tax cuts include incentives for companies to manufacture and install solar panels, wind turbines and other technologies meant to reduce fossil fuel emissions, which are a centerpiece of the climate law he signed in 2022. That law also contained tax cuts for people who buy certain low-emission technologies, such as electric vehicles and heat pumps.

Biden gave tax breaks to semiconductor factories as well, as part of a bipartisan advanced manufacturing bill he signed earlier that year.

The president also included temporary tax breaks for individuals and certain businesses in his 2021 economic stimulus bill, the American Rescue Plan. The legislation expanded a tax credit for parents. It provided $1,400 direct checks for low- and middle-income Americans, which were technically advance payments on tax credits.

Biden has partly offset all of his tax cuts with a pair of major new levies. Corporations are now required to pay a tax when they buy back their own stock. Another tax requires large corporations to pay a minimum 15% federal income tax, even if they qualify for deductions that would have made them owe less.

The president has also directed tens of billions of dollars to the IRS to help crack down on high earners and corporations that evade paying the taxes they owe — an effort that will increase federal tax revenues but does not increase tax rates.

But the president has struggled to persuade Congress — including a sufficient number of Democrats, in the two years his party controlled the House and the Senate on his watch — to sign on to a fleet of other proposed tax increases.

Biden’s budget requests have been filled with ideas for taxing high earners and corporations. Those have failed to gain traction on Capitol Hill. His most recent budget includes about $5 trillion of tax increases spread over a decade, including long-standing Democratic plans like raising the corporate income tax rate to 28% from 21%.

Republicans assailed Biden for tax plans they say will cripple the economy. Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, chair of the Budget Committee, said in a hearing Thursday that Biden believed “in more government and more spending and more taxing as the answers to the problems that our country faces.”

Biden has emphasized his tax proposals in recent weeks, including during his State of the Union address. The president has repeatedly said he would not raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000 a year, while calling on millionaires and billionaires to pay more.

He has also vaunted his tax record, as he did last week in Las Vegas. “In 2020, 55 of the largest Fortune 500 companies made $40 billion in profits,” Biden said. “They paid zero in federal taxes. Not anymore.”

Biden was referring to the corporate minimum tax created by the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 law that also included the climate-related tax incentives. The Treasury Department has struggled to implement that tax, which companies faced for the first time last year.

The department does not yet have data on how many corporations will pay the tax for 2023, officials said this week.

c.2024 The New York Times Company

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Biden unveils almost $20 bn for Intel to boost US chip production

ALL CAPITALI$M IS STATE CAPITALI$M

By AFP
March 20, 2024

US President Joe Biden speaks at the Intel Ocotillo Campus in Chandler, Arizona - Copyright AFP Brendan Smialowski

Brendan Smialowski with Daniel Avis in Washington

US President Joe Biden unveiled almost $20 billion in grants and loans Wednesday for Intel’s domestic chip-making plants — his administration’s biggest investment yet in the sector as he takes on China’s chip dominance and sells his economic achievements over election rival Donald Trump.

Biden’s decision to make the announcement during a trip to Arizona underscores his strategy of highlighting legislative achievements in key battleground states ahead of November’s presidential rematch against Republican Trump.

“Unlike my predecessor, I was determined to turn things around to invest in America — all-American, all Americans. And that’s what we’ve been doing,” Biden said in a speech at the Intel Ocotillo Campus in Chandler, Arizona.

Biden said the investment in Intel facilities in four states — Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico and Oregon — would put the United States on track to manufacture 20 percent of the world’s leading-edge chips by the end of the decade.

He then took a further dig at Trump, saying that “my predecessor would let the future rebuild in China and other countries, not America, because it may be cheaper.”

Arizona, in the southwestern United States, was one of the tightest races of 2020, with Biden winning by just 10,457 votes — and the president will likely need to win it again in 2024.

The Democrat, 81, faces a tough reelection fight as he seeks to convince voters still skeptical about his economic record, despite strong recent growth and job creation data, persistently low unemployment, and slowing inflation.

The White House said the deal with Intel would provide up to $8.5 billion in direct funding along with $11 billion in loans under the CHIPS and Science Act.

– ‘America’s comeback’ –

The $8.5 billion is the largest of any grant made so far under the $52.7 billion 2022 legislation, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters ahead of the announcement.

The money will help incentivize Intel to make more than $100 billion worth of investments, which will be one of the largest investments ever in US semiconductor manufacturing, she said.

“We rely on a very small number of factories in Asia for all of our most sophisticated chips. That’s untenable and unacceptable,” she said.

“It’s an economic security problem. It’s a national security problem. And we’re going to change that,” she added.

Intel also plans to claim the US Treasury Department’s Investment Tax Credit of up to 25 percent on some capital expenditures, according to the White House, which would significantly increase the amount of financial support it receives from the US government.

The tax credit is linked to a separate Biden administration policy — also adopted in 2022 — called the Inflation Reduction Act.

“Intel’s investment is an exciting part of America’s comeback story, with leading edge semiconductor manufacturing coming back to America for the first time in 40 years,” Biden’s National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard told reporters on the same call.

The new funding will create 10,000 new manufacturing roles and 20,000 construction jobs, many of them unionized, Brainard said.

The White House estimates the investment will directly support at least 10,000 new jobs in both Arizona and Ohio. Some 3,000 roles in each state will be in manufacturing, and the remaining 7,000 will be in construction.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

A new way to quantify climate change impacts: “Outdoor days”

This measure, developed by MIT researchers, reflects direct effects on people’s quality of life — and reveals significant global disparities

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

For most people, reading about the difference between a global average temperature rise of 1.5 C versus 2 C doesn’t conjure up a clear image of how their daily lives will actually be affected. So, researchers at MIT have come up with a different way of measuring and describing what global climate change patterns, in specific regions around the world, will mean for people’s daily activities and their quality of life.

The new measure, called “outdoor days,” describes the number of days per year that outdoor temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for people to go about normal outdoor activities, whether work or leisure, in reasonable comfort. Describing the impact of rising temperatures in those terms reveals some significant global disparities, the researchers say.

The findings are described in a research paper written by MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Elfatih Eltahir and postdocs Yeon-Woo Choi and Muhammad Khalifa, and published in the Journal of Climate.

Eltahir says he got the idea for this new system during his hourlong daily walks in the Boston area. “That’s how I interface with the temperature every day,” he says. He found that there have been more winter days recently when he could walk comfortably than in past years. Originally from Sudan, he says that when he returned there for visits, the opposite was the case: In winter, the weather tends to be relatively comfortable, but the number of these clement winter days has been declining. “There are fewer days that are really suitable for outdoor activity,” Eltahir says.

Rather than predefine what constitutes an acceptable outdoor day, Eltahir and his co-authors created a website where users can set their own definition of the highest and lowest temperatures they consider comfortable for their outside activities, then click on a country within a world map, or a state within the U.S., and get a forecast of how the number of days meeting those criteria will change between now and the end of this century. The website is freely available for anyone to use.

“This is actually a new feature that’s quite innovative,” he says. “We don’t tell people what an outdoor day should be; we let the user define an outdoor day. Hence, we invite them to participate in defining how future climate change will impact their quality of life, and hopefully, this will facilitate deeper understanding of how climate change will impact individuals directly.”

After deciding that this was a way of looking at the issue of climate change that might be useful, Eltahir says, “we started looking at the data on this, and we made several discoveries that I think are pretty significant.”

First of all, there will be winners and losers, and the losers tend to be concentrated in the global south. “In the North, in a place like Russia or Canada, you gain a significant number of outdoor days. And when you go south to places like Bangladesh or Sudan, it’s bad news. You get significantly fewer outdoor days. It is very striking.”

To derive the data, the software developed by the team uses all of the available climate models, about 50 of them, and provides output showing all of those projections on a single graph to make clear the range of possibilities, as well as the average forecast.

When we think of climate change, Eltahir says, we tend to look at maps that show that virtually everywhere, temperatures will rise. “But if you think in terms of outdoor days, you see that the world is not flat. The North is gaining; the South is losing.”

While North-South disparity in exposure and vulnerability has been broadly recognized in the past, he says, this way of quantifying the effects on the hazard (change in weather patterns) helps to bring home how strong the uneven risks from climate change on quality of life will be. “When you look at places like Bangladesh, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Indonesia — they are all losing outdoor days.”

The same kind of disparity shows up in Europe, he says. The effects are already being felt, and are showing up in travel patterns: “There is a shift to people spending time in northern European states. They go to Sweden and places like that instead of the Mediterranean, which is showing a significant drop,” he says.

Placing this kind of detailed and localized information at people’s fingertips, he says, “I think brings the issue of communication of climate change to a different level.” With this tool, instead of looking at global averages, “we are saying according to your own definition of what a pleasant day is, [this is] how climate change is going to impact you, your activities.”

And, he adds, “hopefully that will help society make decisions about what to do with this global challenge.”

The project received support from the MIT Climate Grand Challenges project and the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab.

###

Written by David Chandler, MIT News

Paper: “North-South disparity in impact of climate change on “outdoor days””

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/aop/JCLI-D-23-0346.1/JCLI-D-23-0346.1.xml

JOURNAL

Journal of Climate

DOI

10.1175/JCLI-D-23-0346.1

ARTICLE TITLE

“North-South disparity in impact of climate change on “outdoor days””

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

FUSION-SCI-FI-TEK

Contract for ITER vacuum vessel assembly

05 March 2024

The Sino-French TAC-1 consortium - led by China National Nuclear Corporation subsidiary China Nuclear Power Engineering and including Framatome - has been awarded a contract to assemble the vacuum chamber modules of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), under construction in Cadarache, southern France.

Representatives from the TAC-1 consortium companies (Image: CNNC)

ITER's plasma chamber, or vacuum vessel, houses the fusion reactions and acts as a first safety containment barrier. With an interior volume of 1400 cubic metres, it will be formed from nine wedge-shaped steel sectors that measure more than 14 metres in height and weigh 440 tonnes. The ITER vacuum vessel, once assembled, will have an outer diameter of 19.4 metres, a height of 11.4 metres, and weigh approximately 5200 tonnes. With the subsequent installation of in-vessel components such as the blanket and the divertor, the vacuum vessel will weigh 8500 tonnes.

The fabrication of the vacuum vessel sectors is shared between Europe (five sectors) and South Korea (four sectors). Vacuum vessel sector 6, at the centre of the assembly, and associated thermal shielding has already been manufactured and delivered by the Korean Domestic Agency. The first sector, 5, being supplied by Europe has now been manufactured in Italy and is undergoing factory acceptance tests prior to being shipped to the construction site.

Shen Yanfeng, deputy general manager of China National Nuclear Corporation, noted that the signing of the agreement means that the Chinese-French consortium has become the sole contractor for the installation of the Tokamak machine of the ITER project.

China formally agreed to join the ITER project in 2006. Since 2008, China has undertaken 18 procurement package tasks of research and manufacture, involving key components such as the magnet support system, magnet feeder system, power supply system, glow discharge cleaning system, gas injection system, and the 'first wall' of the reactor core, which is capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures.

In September 2019, the five-member Chinese-French consortium signed the TAC-1 installation contract with ITER, marking the beginning of China's in-depth participation in the tokamak. TAC-1 focuses on the assembly of the cryostat and cryostat thermal shield, the magnet feeders, the central solenoid, poloidal field and correction coil magnets, and cooling structures and instrumentation.

ITER is a major international project to build a tokamak fusion device in Cadarache, France, designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy. The goal of ITER is to operate at 500 MW (for at least 400 seconds continuously) with 50 MW of plasma heating power input. It appears that an additional 300 MWe of electricity input may be required in operation. No electricity will be generated at ITER.

Thirty-five nations are collaborating to build ITER - the European Union is contributing almost half of the cost of its construction, while the other six members (China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the USA) are contributing equally to the rest. Construction began in 2010 and the original 2018 first plasma target date was put back to 2025 by the ITER council in 2016. In June last year, the ITER Organisation was expected to reveal a revised timeline for the project but instead put back by a year an announcement on an updated timeline.

The revamped project plan for ITER - with modifications to its configuration, phased installation and new research schedule - is being finalised ahead of being submitted to the ITER Council in June.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

MIT’s Superconducting Magnets Mark Major Fusion Milestone

By Brian Westenhaus - Mar 05, 2024

MIT researchers achieve a world-record magnetic field strength using high-temperature superconducting magnets, demonstrating their potential for compact fusion power plants.
The comprehensive study, detailed in six peer-reviewed papers, validates the magnet's design and performance, offering a solid foundation for future fusion devices.
By leveraging new materials and innovative design approaches, MIT and its partners pave the way for practical fusion energy, promising a cleaner, limitless energy source for the future.

An MIT comprehensive study of high-temperature superconducting magnets confirms they meet requirements for an economic, compact fusion power plant.

A detailed report by researchers at PSFC and MIT spinout company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), published in a collection of six peer-reviewed papers in a special edition of the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. Together, the papers describe the design and fabrication of the magnet and the diagnostic equipment needed to evaluate its performance, as well as the lessons learned from the process. Overall, the team found, the predictions and computer modeling were spot-on, verifying that the magnet’s unique design elements could serve as the foundation for a fusion power plant. Back during the predawn hours of Sept. 5, 2021, engineers achieved a major milestone in the labs of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), when a new type of magnet, made from high-temperature superconducting material, achieved a world-record magnetic field strength of 20 tesla for a large-scale magnet. That’s the intensity needed to build a fusion power plant that is expected to produce a net output of power and potentially usher in an era of virtually limitless power production.

The test was immediately declared a success, having met all the criteria established for the design of the new fusion device, dubbed SPARC, for which the magnets are the key enabling technology. Champagne corks popped as the weary team of experimenters, who had labored long and hard to make the achievement possible, celebrated their accomplishment.

But that was far from the end of the process. Over the ensuing months, the team tore apart and inspected the components of the magnet, pored over and analyzed the data from hundreds of instruments that recorded details of the tests, and performed two additional test runs on the same magnet, ultimately pushing it to its breaking point in order to learn the details of any possible failure modes.

Enabling practical fusion power

The successful test of the magnet, said Hitachi America Professor of Engineering Dennis Whyte, who recently stepped down as director of the PSFC, was “the most important thing, in my opinion, in the last 30 years of fusion research.”

Before the Sept. 2021 demonstration, the best-available superconducting magnets were powerful enough to potentially achieve fusion energy – but only at sizes and costs that could never be practical or economically viable. Then, when the tests showed the practicality of such a strong magnet at a greatly reduced size, “overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day,” Whyte said.

“Now fusion has a chance,” Whyte added. Tokamaks, the most widely used design for experimental fusion devices, “have a chance, in my opinion, of being economical because you’ve got a quantum change in your ability, with the known confinement physics rules, about being able to greatly reduce the size and the cost of objects that would make fusion possible.”

The comprehensive data and analysis from the PSFC’s magnet test, as detailed in the six new papers, has demonstrated that plans for a new generation of fusion devices – the one designed by MIT and CFS, as well as similar designs by other commercial fusion companies – are built on a solid foundation in science.

The superconducting breakthrough

Fusion, the process of combining light atoms to form heavier ones, powers the sun and stars, but harnessing that process on Earth has proved to be a daunting challenge, with decades of hard work and many billions of dollars spent on experimental devices. The long-sought, but never yet achieved, goal is to build a fusion power plant that produces more energy than it consumes. Such a power plant could produce electricity without emitting greenhouse gases during operation, and generating very little radioactive waste. Fusion’s fuel, a form of hydrogen that can be derived from seawater, is virtually limitless.

In the last few years, a newer material nicknamed REBCO, for rare-earth barium copper oxide, was added to fusion magnets, and allows them to operate at 20 kelvins, a temperature that despite being only 16 kelvins warmer, brings significant advantages in terms of material properties and practical engineering.

Taking advantage of this new higher-temperature superconducting material was not just a matter of substituting it in existing magnet designs. Instead, “it was a rework from the ground up of almost all the principles that you use to build superconducting magnets,” Whyte said. The new REBCO material is “extraordinarily different than the previous generation of superconductors. You’re not just going to adapt and replace, you’re actually going to innovate from the ground up.” The new papers in Transactions on Applied Superconductivity describe the details of that redesign process, now that patent protection is in place.

A key innovation: no insulation

One of the dramatic innovations, which had many others in the field skeptical of its chances of success, was the elimination of insulation around the thin, flat ribbons of superconducting tape that formed the magnet. Like virtually all electrical wires, conventional superconducting magnets are fully protected by insulating material to prevent short-circuits between the wires. But in the new magnet, the tape was left completely bare; the engineers relied on REBCO’s much greater conductivity to keep the current flowing through the material.

Zach Hartwig, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. Hartwig has a co-appointment at the PSFC and is the head of its engineering group, which led the magnet development project explained, “When we started this project, in let’s say 2018, the technology of using high-temperature superconductors to build large-scale high-field magnets was in its infancy. The state of the art was small benchtop experiments, not really representative of what it takes to build a full-size thing. Our magnet development project started at benchtop scale and ended up at full scale in a short amount of time,” he added, noting that the team built a 20,000-pound magnet that produced a steady, even magnetic field of just over 20 tesla – far beyond any such field ever produced at large scale.

“The standard way to build these magnets is you would wind the conductor and you have insulation between the windings, and you need insulation to deal with the high voltages that are generated during off-normal events such as a shutdown.” Eliminating the layers of insulation, he says, “has the advantage of being a low-voltage system. It greatly simplifies the fabrication processes and schedule.” It also leaves more room for other elements, such as more cooling or more structure for strength.

The magnet assembly is a slightly smaller-scale version of the ones that will form the donut-shaped chamber of the SPARC fusion device now being built by CFS in Devens, Massachusetts. It consists of 16 plates, called pancakes, each bearing a spiral winding of the superconducting tape on one side and cooling channels for helium gas on the other.

But the no-insulation design was considered risky, and a lot was riding on the test program. “This was the first magnet at any sufficient scale that really probed what is involved in designing and building and testing a magnet with this so-called no-insulation no-twist technology,” Hartwig said. “It was very much a surprise to the community when we announced that it was a no-insulation coil.”

Pushing to the limit … and beyond

The initial test, described in previous papers, proved that the design and manufacturing process not only worked but was highly stable – something that some researchers had doubted. The next two test runs, also performed in late 2021, then pushed the device to the limit by deliberately creating unstable conditions, including a complete shutoff of incoming power that can lead to a catastrophic overheating. Known as quenching, this is considered a worst-case scenario for the operation of such magnets, with the potential to destroy the equipment.

Part of the mission of the test program, Hartwig said, was “to actually go off and intentionally quench a full-scale magnet, so that we can get the critical data at the right scale and the right conditions to advance the science, to validate the design codes, and then to take the magnet apart and see what went wrong, why did it go wrong, and how do we take the next iteration toward fixing that . . . it was a very successful test.”

That final test, which ended with the melting of one corner of one of the 16 pancakes, produced a wealth of new information, Hartwig noted. For one thing, they had been using several different computational models to design and predict the performance of various aspects of the magnet’s performance, and for the most part, the models agreed in their overall predictions and were well-validated by the series of tests and real-world measurements. But in predicting the effect of the quench, the model predictions diverged, so it was necessary to get the experimental data to evaluate the models’ validity.

“The highest-fidelity models that we had predicted almost exactly how the magnet would warm up, to what degree it would warm up as it started to quench, and where would the resulting damage to the magnet would be,” he noted. As described in detail in one of the new reports, “That test actually told us exactly the physics that was going on, and it told us which models were useful going forward and which to leave by the wayside because they’re not right.”

Whyte commented, “Basically we did the worst thing possible to a coil, on purpose, after we had tested all other aspects of the coil performance. And we found that most of the coil survived with no damage,” while one isolated area sustained some melting. “It’s like a few percent of the volume of the coil that got damaged.” And that led to revisions in the design that are expected to prevent such damage in the actual fusion device magnets, even under the most extreme conditions.

Hartwig emphasizes that a major reason the team was able to accomplish such a radical new record-setting magnet design, and get it right the very first time and on a breakneck schedule, was thanks to the deep level of knowledge, expertise, and equipment accumulated over decades of operation of the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, and other work carried out at PSFC. “This goes to the heart of the institutional capabilities of a place like this,” he said. “We had the capability, the infrastructure, and the space and the people to do these things under one roof.”

The collaboration with CFS was also key, he said, with MIT and CFS combining the most powerful aspects of an academic institution and private company to do things together that neither could have done on their own. “For example, one of the major contributions from CFS was leveraging the power of a private company to establish and scale up a supply chain at an unprecedented level and timeline for the most critical material in the project: 300 kilometers (186 miles) of high-temperature superconductor, which was procured with rigorous quality control in under a year, and integrated on schedule into the magnet.”

The integration of the two teams, those from MIT and those from CFS, also was crucial to the success, he said. “We thought of ourselves as one team, and that made it possible to do what we did.”

It sounds like the past 2 ½ years have proven the immense value of the rare-earth barium copper oxide development. Even more impressive is that the team and its funders tried the no insulation technique and succeeded.

They have just put much better confinement power into the fusion effort.

And it won’t be just the tokomak devices getting the upgrade. Many of us still have a lot of confidence in the potential of the Robert Bussard based device and others.

Then there is the likelihood that superconducting magnet development will make more strides to higher temperatures.

Meanwhile Eric Lerner is working the plasma confinement idea and is improving steadily.

There just might be power plant choices sooner that the cynics could imagine.

By Brian Westenhaus via New Energy and Fuel

Tests show high-temperature superconducting magnets are ready for fusion

Detailed study of magnets built by MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems confirms they meet requirements for an economic, compact fusion power plant.

NEWS RELEASE 4-MAR-2024

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Fusion Magnets — IMAGE:
IN MIT’S PLASMA SCIENCE AND FUSION CENTER, THE NEW MAGNETS ACHIEVED A WORLD-RECORD MAGNETIC FIELD STRENGTH OF 20 TESLA FOR A LARGE-SCALE MAGNET.
view more
CREDIT: IMAGE: GRETCHEN ERTL

In the predawn hours of Sept. 5, 2021, engineers achieved a major milestone in the labs of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), when a new type of magnet, made from high-temperature superconducting material, achieved a world-record magnetic field strength of 20 tesla for a large-scale magnet. That’s the intensity needed to build a fusion power plant that is expected to produce a net output of power and potentially usher in an era of virtually limitless power production.

All of this work has now culminated in a detailed report by researchers at PSFC and MIT spinout company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), published in a collection of six peer-reviewed papers in a special edition of the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. Together, the papers describe the design and fabrication of the magnet and the diagnostic equipment needed to evaluate its performance, as well as the lessons learned from the process. Overall, the team found, the predictions and computer modeling were spot-on, verifying that the magnet’s unique design elements could serve as the foundation for a fusion power plant.

Enabling practical fusion power

The successful test of the magnet, says Hitachi America Professor of Engineering Dennis Whyte, who recently stepped down as director of the PSFC, was “the most important thing, in my opinion, in the last 30 years of fusion research.”

Before the Sept. 5 demonstration, the best-available superconducting magnets were powerful enough to potentially achieve fusion energy — but only at sizes and costs that could never be practical or economically viable. Then, when the tests showed the practicality of such a strong magnet at a greatly reduced size, “overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day,” Whyte says.

“Now fusion has a chance,” Whyte adds. Tokamaks, the most widely used design for experimental fusion devices, “have a chance, in my opinion, of being economical because you’ve got a quantum change in your ability, with the known confinement physics rules, about being able to greatly reduce the size and the cost of objects that would make fusion possible.”

The comprehensive data and analysis from the PSFC’s magnet test, as detailed in the six new papers, has demonstrated that plans for a new generation of fusion devices — the one designed by MIT and CFS, as well as similar designs by other commercial fusion companies — are built on a solid foundation in science.

The superconducting breakthrough

But to make it work requires compressing the fuel at extraordinarily high temperatures and pressures, and since no known material could withstand such temperatures, the fuel must be held in place by extremely powerful magnetic fields. Producing such strong fields requires superconducting magnets, but all previous fusion magnets have been made with a superconducting material that requires frigid temperatures of about 4 degrees above absolute zero (4 kelvins, or -270 degrees Celsius). In the last few years, a newer material nicknamed REBCO, for rare-earth barium copper oxide, was added to fusion magnets, and allows them to operate at 20 kelvins, a temperature that despite being only 16 kelvins warmer, brings significant advantages in terms of material properties and practical engineering.

Taking advantage of this new higher-temperature superconducting material was not just a matter of substituting it in existing magnet designs. Instead, “it was a rework from the ground up of almost all the principles that you use to build superconducting magnets,” Whyte says. The new REBCO material is “extraordinarily different than the previous generation of superconductors. You’re not just going to adapt and replace, you’re actually going to innovate from the ground up.” The new papers in Transactions on Applied Superconductivity describe the details of that redesign process, now that patent protection is in place.

A key innovation: no insulation

“When we started this project, in let’s say 2018, the technology of using high-temperature superconductors to build large-scale high-field magnets was in its infancy,” says Zach Hartwig, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. Hartwig has a co-appointment at the PSFC and is the head of its engineering group, which led the magnet development project. “The state of the art was small benchtop experiments, not really representative of what it takes to build a full-size thing. Our magnet development project started at benchtop scale and ended up at full scale in a short amount of time,” he adds, noting that the team built a 20,000-pound magnet that produced a steady, even magnetic field of just over 20 tesla — far beyond any such field ever produced at large scale.

But the no-insulation design was considered risky, and a lot was riding on the test program. “This was the first magnet at any sufficient scale that really probed what is involved in designing and building and testing a magnet with this so-called no-insulation no-twist technology,” Hartwig says. “It was very much a surprise to the community when we announced that it was a no-insulation coil.”

Pushing to the limit … and beyond

The initial test, described in previous papers, proved that the design and manufacturing process not only worked but was highly stable — something that some researchers had doubted. The next two test runs, also performed in late 2021, then pushed the device to the limit by deliberately creating unstable conditions, including a complete shutoff of incoming power that can lead to a catastrophic overheating. Known as quenching, this is considered a worst-case scenario for the operation of such magnets, with the potential to destroy the equipment.

Part of the mission of the test program, Hartwig says, was “to actually go off and intentionally quench a full-scale magnet, so that we can get the critical data at the right scale and the right conditions to advance the science, to validate the design codes, and then to take the magnet apart and see what went wrong, why did it go wrong, and how do we take the next iteration toward fixing that. … It was a very successful test.”

That final test, which ended with the melting of one corner of one of the 16 pancakes, produced a wealth of new information, Hartwig says. For one thing, they had been using several different computational models to design and predict the performance of various aspects of the magnet’s performance, and for the most part, the models agreed in their overall predictions and were well-validated by the series of tests and real-world measurements. But in predicting the effect of the quench, the model predictions diverged, so it was necessary to get the experimental data to evaluate the models’ validity.

“The highest-fidelity models that we had predicted almost exactly how the magnet would warm up, to what degree it would warm up as it started to quench, and where would the resulting damage to the magnet would be,” he says. As described in detail in one of the new reports, “That test actually told us exactly the physics that was going on, and it told us which models were useful going forward and which to leave by the wayside because they’re not right.”

Whyte says, “Basically we did the worst thing possible to a coil, on purpose, after we had tested all other aspects of the coil performance. And we found that most of the coil survived with no damage,” while one isolated area sustained some melting. “It’s like a few percent of the volume of the coil that got damaged.” And that led to revisions in the design that are expected to prevent such damage in the actual fusion device magnets, even under the most extreme conditions.

Hartwig emphasizes that a major reason the team was able to accomplish such a radical new record-setting magnet design, and get it right the very first time and on a breakneck schedule, was thanks to the deep level of knowledge, expertise, and equipment accumulated over decades of operation of the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, and other work carried out at PSFC. “This goes to the heart of the institutional capabilities of a place like this,” he says. “We had the capability, the infrastructure, and the space and the people to do these things under one roof.”

The collaboration with CFS was also key, he says, with MIT and CFS combining the most powerful aspects of an academic institution and private company to do things together that neither could have done on their own. “For example, one of the major contributions from CFS was leveraging the power of a private company to establish and scale up a supply chain at an unprecedented level and timeline for the most critical material in the project: 300 kilometers (186 miles) of high-temperature superconductor, which was procured with rigorous quality control in under a year, and integrated on schedule into the magnet.”

The integration of the two teams, those from MIT and those from CFS, also was crucial to the success, he says. “We thought of ourselves as one team, and that made it possible to do what we did.”

Written by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

Papers: Special issue on the SPARC Toroidal Field Model Coil Program

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=10348035&punumber=77

JOURNAL

IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity

ARTICLE TITLE

Special issue on the SPARC Toroidal Field Model Coil Program

One way to improve a fusion reaction: Use weaknesses as strengths

Scientists take advantage of imperfections in magnetic fields to enhance fusion plasma

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DOE/PRINCETON PLASMA PHYSICS LABORATORY

In the Japanese art of Kintsugi, an artist takes the broken shards of a bowl and fuses them back together with gold to make a final product more beautiful than the original.

That idea is inspiring a new approach to managing plasma, the super-hot state of matter, for use as a power source. Scientists are using the imperfections in magnetic fields that confine a reaction to improve and enhance the plasma in an approach outlined in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

“This approach allows you to maintain a high-performance plasma, controlling instabilities in the core and the edge of the plasma simultaneously. That simultaneous control is particularly important and difficult to do. That’s what makes this work special,” said Joseph Snipes of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). He is PPPL’s deputy head of the Tokamak Experimental Science Department and was a co-author of the paper.

PPPL Physicist Seong-Moo Yang led the research team, which spans various institutions in the U.S. and South Korea. Yang says this is the first time any research team has validated a systematic approach to tailoring magnetic field imperfections to make the plasma suitable for use as a power source. These magnetic field imperfections are known as error fields.

“Our novel method identifies optimal error field corrections, enhancing plasma stability,” Yang said. “This method was proven to enhance plasma stability under different plasma conditions, for example, when the plasma was under conditions of high and low magnetic confinement.”

Errors that are hard to correct

Error fields are typically caused by minuscule defects in the magnetic coils of the device that holds the plasma, which is called a tokamak. Until now, error fields were only seen as a nuisance because even a very small error field could cause a plasma disruption that halts fusion reactions and can damage the walls of a fusion vessel. Consequently, fusion researchers have spent considerable time and effort meticulously finding ways to correct error fields.

“It’s quite difficult to eliminate existing error fields, so instead of fixing these coil irregularities, we can apply additional magnetic fields surrounding the fusion vessel in a process known as error field correction,” Yang said.

In the past, this approach would have also hurt the plasma’s core, making the plasma unsuitable for fusion power generation. This time, the researchers were able to eliminate instabilities at the edge of the plasma and maintain the stability of the core. The research is a prime example of how PPPL researchers are bridging the gap between today’s fusion technology and what will be needed to bring fusion power to the electrical grid.

“This is actually a very effective way of breaking the symmetry of the system, so humans can intentionally degrade the confinement. It’s like making a very tiny hole in a balloon so that it will not explode,” said SangKyeun Kim, a staff research scientist at PPPL and paper co-author. Just as air would leak out of a small hole in a balloon, a tiny quantity of plasma leaks out of the error field, which helps to maintain its overall stability.

Managing the core and the edge of the plasma simultaneously

One of the toughest parts of managing a fusion reaction is getting both the core and the edge of the plasma to behave at the same time. There are ideal zones for the temperature and density of the plasma in both regions, and hitting those targets while eliminating instabilities is tough.

This study demonstrates that adjusting the error fields can simultaneously stabilize both the core and the edge of the plasma. By carefully controlling the magnetic fields produced by the tokamak’s coils, the researchers could suppress edge instabilities, also known as edge localized modes (ELMs), without causing disruptions or a substantial loss of confinement.

“We are trying to protect the device,” said PPPL Staff Research Physicist Qiming Hu, an author of the paper.

Extending the research beyond KSTAR

The research was conducted using the KSTAR tokamak in South Korea, which stands out for its ability to adjust its magnetic error field configuration with great flexibility. This capability is crucial for experimenting with different error field configurations to find the most effective ones for stabilizing the plasma.

The researchers say their approach has significant implications for the design of future tokamak fusion pilot plants, potentially making them more efficient and reliable. They are currently working on an artificial intelligence (AI) version of their control system to make it more efficient.

“These models are fairly complex; they take a bit of time to calculate. But when you want to do something in a real-time control system, you can only afford a few milliseconds to do a calculation,” said Snipes. “Using AI, you can basically teach the system what to expect and be able to use that artificial intelligence to predict ahead of time what will be necessary to control the plasma and how to implement it in real-time.”

While their new paper highlights work done using KSTAR’s internal magnetic coils, Hu suggests future research with magnetic coils outside of the fusion vessel would be valuable because the fusion community is moving away from the idea of housing such coils inside the vacuum-sealed vessel due to the potential destruction of such components from the extreme heat of the plasma.

Researchers from the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE), Columbia University, and Seoul National University were also integral to the project.

The research was supported by: the U.S. Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC02-09CH11466; the Ministry of Science and ICT under the KFE R&D Program “KSTAR Experimental Collaboration and Fusion Plasma Research (KFE-EN2401-15)”; the National Research Foundation (NRF) grant No. RS-2023-00281272 funded through the Korean Ministry of Science, Information and Communication Technology and the New Faculty Startup Fund from Seoul National University; the NRF under grants No. 2019R1F1A1057545 and No. 2022R1F1A1073863; the National R&D Program through the NRF funded by the Ministry of Science & ICT (NRF-2019R1A2C1010757).

JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-024-45454-1

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Tailoring tokamak error fields to control plasma instabilities and transport

INFUSE workshop gives private and public fusion partners a chance to network and share experiences

Meeting Announcement

DOE/PRINCETON PLASMA PHYSICS LABORATORY

Tour of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory at INFUSE 2024 Work — IMAGE:
PPPL’S HEAD OF SCIENCE EDUCATION ARTURO DOMINGUEZ (FAR RIGHT) TAKES A GROUP OF INFUSE WORKSHOP ATTENDEES ON A TOUR OF THE LAB.
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CREDIT: MICHAEL LIVINGSTON, PPPL

More than 120 people gathered for the 2024 Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) Workshop at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) from Feb. 27-28.

The event, which was sponsored by the DOE’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (FES), is a part of the INFUSE awards program that funds laboratories or universities so they can partner with private sector companies working on the science and technology solutions that will bring fusion energy to the power grid. To date, the DOE has granted 90 awards, with most ranging from $100,000 to $350,000 for a 12-month project.

“The INFUSE program continues to help bring together the accumulated knowledge and expertise developed in national labs and universities with the private companies that want to reduce risks and drive their technologies forward,” said Erik Gilson, INFUSE deputy director and head of PPPL’s Discovery Plasma Science Department. “These types of public-private partnerships really bring out the best in each sector. I’m excited to see what new partnerships emerge as the result of people networking at the workshop.”

Developing a system for using fusion as a source of electricity is as important as it is complex.

Fusion could support our ever-growing need for energy without contributing to carbon emissions. But the challenge is arduous and multifaceted, as fusion requires new materials, engineering and software.

“I believe we are going to conquer this issue of making fusion cheap enough for the market, but it would sure be nice if it were soon,” said PPPL Lab Director Steven Cowley during his opening remarks at the workshop.

Cowley said he believes part of overcoming the challenges to bringing fusion energy to the power grid is embracing public-private partnerships and noted that, ultimately, it will be private industry that brings fusion to the market efficiently. “We are here to support you,” he told workshop attendees.

“The tone of the meeting was set based on what we heard from the respondents to a survey from a previous virtual workshop, which showed the greatest need was for networking opportunities,” said Arnie Lumsdaine, INFUSE director and group leader of fusion engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Consequently, technical sessions were kept to a minimum, with the bulk of the two-day program offering opportunities for private companies to learn more about what each national lab had to offer and discuss collaboration possibilities.

Scott Hsu, senior advisor and lead fusion coordinator in the Office of the Under Secretary for Science and Innovation at the DOE, explained the elements essential to realizing President Joe Biden’s “Bold Decadal Vision” for fusion energy. “We want to ensure that fusion is a leader in supporting a clean energy transition,” said Hsu. This, he explained, requires everything from closing the science and technology gaps to building a fusion pilot plant, establishing reliable supply chains –– especially for fusion fuels, developing a waste management strategy, instituting regulatory frameworks, and establishing external partnerships, including with state and local governments, nongovernmental organizations, academia and the private sector.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) Scientist Maria Baldini was among the many representatives from the national labs. “This workshop offers me a good opportunity to meet people in the private sector,” Baldini said. “We are trying to develop a program to study the properties of a new kind of conductor under different engineering constraints that would be used for fusion machines, and it would be good for me to know the people in the private sector who produce this conductor and try to think about how we can collaborate.”

In addition to opportunities to network, the workshop offered a lengthy question-and-answer session with Fusion Industry Association Chief Executive Officer Andrew Holland, tours of PPPL, technical sessions, presentations about successful INFUSE projects and information about the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) process.

PPPL’s Strategic Partnership Officer David Zimmerman was one of the speakers providing advice on the CRADA process. “You can see from the number of applications that the INFUSE program generates and the number of grant awards that it makes that this program is really driving public-private partnerships,” said Zimmerman. “I think it’s a fantastic mechanism program to advertise laboratory capabilities to fusion companies and to give laboratories an opportunity to engage with this exciting new fusion industry.”

Aaron Froese, a computational plasma physicist at General Fusion in British Columbia, Canada, said the INFUSE awards have allowed the company to extend research critical to advancing their magnetized target fusion technology for commercialization. In a General Fusion commercial power plant, the company says a plasma liner made of liquid lithium will improve device longevity (by shielding structural components from fast fusion neutrons), increase the tritium breeding ratio and act as the medium to transfer the kinetic energy from the compression drivers, addressing the significant barriers to commercialization. General Fusion has worked with several U.S. national labs under INFUSE awards, including PPPL, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Savannah River National Laboratory. “The administration has been very receptive to our endeavors,” Froese said. “I think it’s a very well-run program.”

PPPL is mastering the art of using plasma — the fourth state of matter — to solve some of the world's toughest science and technology challenges. Nestled on Princeton University’s Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, New Jersey, our research ignites innovation in a range of applications including fusion energy, nanoscale fabrication, quantum materials and devices, and sustainability science. The University manages the Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the nation’s single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences. Feel the heat at https://energy.gov/science and https://www.pppl.gov.

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