7.30pm, Univ – Goodhart Seminar Room, Thursday of 4th Week (11/02/2010)
Speaker: Steven Cowley
Topic: “International Collaboration Rising to the Energy Challenge – the world’s Fusion Experiment”
Physicist Steven Cowley is certain that nuclear fusion is the only truly sustainable solution to the fuel crisis. He will explain why fusion will work — and details the projects that he and many others have devoted their lives to, working against the clock to create a new source of energy.
The international fusion experiment ITER will start operating in the south of France late in the next decade. This historic experiment will generate up to 500 megawatts of fusion power and provide a proof of principle for fusion energy. Fusion has the potential to provide a large fraction of our energy for millions of years – Mr. Cowley will outline the scale of this promise. He will also discuss the challenge of coordinating a project on a truly international scale and Europe’s role as the host partner.
Who is Steven Cowley?
Steven Cowley – Director of the United Kingdom’s Atomic Energy Authority’s (UKAEA) Culham laboratory– is a leading British physicist who is involved in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). He received his BA from Oxford before moving to Princeton University to get his PhD. From 2001 to 2003 he led the plasma physics group at Imperial College London and remains a part-time professor there. In addition, from 2004 to 2008, Cowley was the Director of the Center for Multi-Scale Plasma Dynamics at the University of California, Los Angeles. There he researched some of the most violent phenomena in the local universe, including solar flares and storms in the Earth’s magnetosphere. Nowadays, he is Director of UKAEA Culham and is collaborating with researchers on the France-based ITER fusion device on projects aimed at finding cheap, nearly limitless carbon-free energy: he is planning devices that, theoretically at least, would contain 100 million degree gas using powerful magnetic fields.
For more information please see the information card on Mr. Lenczner and join the Facebook event for this talk.
