Week 15: Believe it or not

Added February 5th, 2010 in Shutdown Weekly

Most of the scientists and engineers here at JET are not naturally superstitious. However, to quote Niels Bohr, sometimes “it works even if you don’t believe in it” and perhaps this week we can report a good omen for the shutdown.

In week 6 we mentioned the tungsten coated tiles that will be installed in the divertor region, and production of these tiles continues according to plan. The Romanian Association MEdC has taken over Research and Development of the coating process. New tiles have to be baked in the vacuum oven at JET, cleaning them as much as possible before they are sent to Romania to be coated with tungsten. This week as one batch was being carefully unloaded from the oven to be packed in clean packaging, a passing bird ‘left its mark’. If you have never visited the JET facility you may think it is strange that are birds in the buildings, but in fact it is difficult to keep them out. This is bad news for one tile – it has to be cleaned and rebaked – but in the UK it has long been considered good luck for a bird to leave its mark on you! Perhaps this says more about British humour than about British superstitions.

Background information
“Shutdown” in JET terms means to close the experiment down periodically to maintain and upgrade the fusion device. After this period experiments are going to be performed leading to better understanding of how to build and operate JET′s successor ITER. The current shutdown started on 26 October 2009. It is the fifth to be carried out remotely since commissioning JET in 1983. During the shutdown 86,000 components will be changed inside the JET torus.