All the faces of energy at Enea in Frascati

This text is part of the Italian Tech album “In search of a better future”, on newsstands with Repubblica on May 4th.

Bizarre crossing of Roman, Russian and English hills. He was called Ftu, Frascati tokamak upgrade. The last “shot”, as they say here, was in 2019, after thirty years of honorable career. Now they are dismantling it, but in the large hangar with radiation-proof concrete walls his heart is still intact. You see the donut, toroidal structure, the letters “to” from the Russian acronym “to-ka-mak”. You can see the electric coils that kept the plasma in the center of the chamber, “ka”, creating a very powerful magnetic field, “mak”. An experimental fusion reactor: “We’re studying how to keep it in a museum,” the scientist says, staring at it Marco Ciotti, a career atAeneas, now head of the Plasma Physics division. Piece by piece a chapter in the history of Italian nuclear research will leave the scene to make room for a new donut, a new tokamak. It will be called Dtt, Divertor tokamak test, a 600 million euro reactor which it will be used to study a specific piece of the future fusion power plant under construction in Europethe dream of reproducing the energy of the stars here on Earth.

The divertor will be its “tailpipe”, which will carry excess heat out of the nuclear chamber. And the Dtt, ten meters high by ten in diameter, will come built in this same area of ​​the Frascati hill, overlooking Rome. After various postponements, delayed authorizations and bureaucratic difficulties, the construction site should also finally start: “The start of work on the buildings is scheduled for spring 2024 – explains Ciotti – , the start-up between 2028 and 2029”.

Between past and future: the impression in every corner of the Enea Research Center in Frascati, rationalist buildings and super lasers, 1980s telephones and neutron generators, is of being suspended. Walls that tell stories alternating fortunes of the Italian nuclear power, to which this structure was created to ensure research of excellence. Enthusiastically embraced in the Postwar period when here the first laboratories arose under the supervision of Enrico Fermi from the United States, then abandoned after the referendums, then alternately evoked or forgotten. In parallel Aeneas experienced changes of name and mandate – from Nuclear Energy Agency to the current National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development – reorganisations, receiverships, but without ever shutting down research on the atom.

Paola Batistoni, Physics, head of the Fusion Energy Development Division, shows a one-to-one scale model of the famous divertor made together with Ansaldo Nuclear, a copper tube wrapped in tungsten tiles: “The heat on the external surface is 2,000 degrees – he explains – We have developed components able to survive these thermal cycles for years without alterations, studied how to weld the pipe and coating, which must adhere perfectly, then validated the technology”.
This Diverter it will be a piece of Iter, the large experimental reactor under construction in Cadarache, in the South of France, to try to achieve a fusion with positive energy balance. While the new divertor, the one that will be studied thanks to Dtt, will be used for the next step: Demo, the prototype of a real plant which will try to extract the energy and feed it into the grid.

To understand the enormity of the challenge, we need to broaden the field. Place Frascati in the global map of nuclear research and tell the many parallel paths that atomic scientists are exploring. The first, the one with the most immediate prospects, is the evolution of fission, the technology that until now has been used in power plants. Generation IV reactors, lead-cooled and therefore safer, are not far from industrialisation, with many projects at various latitudes. The second way, as revolutionary as it is complex, is fusion: the attempt to reproduce on Earth the reactions that take place in the core of the Sun and other stars, at 200 million degrees. Clean, waste-free, and safe nuclear power, because if it is deprived of fuel, the fusion immediately goes out. Problem: in the stars this inexhaustible source of energy is held together by gravity, here on Earth we need to find another way.

And two other lines of research arise from the two hypotheses of solution. Bombarding fusion fuels, deuterium and tritium, with laser beams fast enough to transform them into plasma without giving them time to expand: it’s called inertial confinement. It is the technology used in the experiment in California that in December took the path a little big step further, generating (slightly) more energy than was fed into the system. The second hypothesis is imprison the plasma inside a magnetic cage. It is the technology tested last year in Oxford and on which tokamaks such as Iter di Cadarache are betting, the experiment that some define as the most complex and expensive in the history of mankind.
“Many of Iter’s technologies are “first-of-a-kind”, never been made before,” explains Batistoni. The contribution of Italy and Aeneas does not stop at the divertor. The Frascati neutron generator, a kind of metal cannon inside a concrete silo, unique in Europe for its power, has tested the impact of the particles on the materials that will end up in the reactor, where in one and a half meters it will go from 200 million degrees to absolute zero. And here in Frascati cables of superconductive material, with zero resistance, have also been developed, inside which the gigantic quantities of electricity will run – 65,000 amperes, against the 10 of the household wire – with which to generate the magnetic fields that enclose the plasma.

Among the orders announced so far for Iter, Italian companies have been awarded jobs for around 2 billion, almost half of the totaltestifying that nuclear energy in our country is not only research, but also a very competitive industrial hard core.
However, the monstrous technical difficulties were not enough, with two components that have recently proved to be imperfect, Iter now also has to face increasing geopolitical turmoil. The project was born at the end of the Cold War by the will of Reagan and Gorbachev, the United States and Russia, to then bring on board Europe – which today hosts it and disburses most of the funds – China, India, South Korea and Japan , each responsible for some part of the reactor. A symbol of the great thaw, just like the International Space Station, which is now dealing with the return of the wars, hot and cold.

“Certainly today that agreement would not be made”, comments Batistoni. “There are some signs of a cooling down, but for now I don’t see any consequences: even after the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the embargo, Russian components have arrived. The international fusion community is united, I hope the conflict doesn’t ruin it”. Great unknown, given that technical and political problems often mix: for example, it is necessary to study a production cycle for the very rare tritium, the isotope of hydrogen which fuels fusion, which however is also a “dual use” element, used in nuclear devices. The great powers are pursuing their national projects in parallel and could decide to invest more resources and energy on those rather than on the great collective experiment.
All this explains why for the Cadarache Iter, where work began a good ten years ago, the budget has increased to 20 billion dollars and the date of the so-called “first plasma” has been postponed from 2019 to 2025, even if the tests really significant ones should not start before 2035. And it also explains why the date of 2050 hypothesized for the next step, i.e. the ignition of Demo, the prototype of a fusion power plant, risks being utopian. Question marks that do not even help the Frascati DTT, an offshoot of those projects with a secular horizon: it will cost 600 million euros, financed in part by the Pnrr and the Lazio Region, but above all by Enea and Eni, the major partners of the consortium which he has to build it. In the meantime, Eni itself, in search of a future beyond gas and oil, has also staked a big chip on the competitor project of Boston’s MIT: again magnetic confinement fusion, but on a smaller scale and with the promise of a shorter realization.

Enea’s scientists and technicians say they are used to the vicissitudes, the troubled history of the agency confirms this. But they ensure that research is going ahead because, explains Batistoni, “a country like Italy cannot afford not to do nuclear research”. After all, at the frontier of the atom, a bit like on the space one, technologies emerge which then have uses in other fields, which the Frascati center demonstrates.

In a laboratory they are produced artificial diamonds to be used in sensors: they are born to survive in the hostile environment of reactors, but they open up prairies of applications, from aerospace to automotive.
In another laboratory a proton accelerator was used to try a new anticancer therapy, exploiting a singular property of those particles which release the energy peak at the end of the stroke. Basically, they will allow cancer cells to be bombed in depth without damaging other tissues: the technology has been validated and transferred to a company in Puglia, which will be able to commercialize it.
The department dealing with “Health and safety technologies” is the one where research comes closest to the market: “Last year we managed to close contracts for 1 million and 700 thousand eurosalmost 30,000 euros per researcher, in fact we support ourselves”, explains the division manager Louis De Dominicis. It shows two prototypes born in the center. A machine close to the patent that through laser spectroscopy it detects food fraud, such as adulterated saffron, or harmful agents, such as nerve agents. And a totem – they call it “the eye of Sauron”, like the villain of the Lord of the rings – which always thanks to the laser detects traces of explosives on people’s clothes that pass in front of them. Last year it was successfully tested in the Rome metro and NATO, which financed it, included it among the most promising security technologies.

Transferring research results to industry is one of Enea’s missionswhich have become many and very varied over the years, from the circular economy to energy efficiency: today the Agency even takes care of drawing up reports on the much-discussed building bonuses.
Thirteen laboratories, four units, four departments, six directorates, 2,300 employees and a lot of bureaucracy. Nuclear power itself is divided between fission, which is mainly studied at Brasimone, on the Emilian Apennines, and fusion, at Frascati: different hills, different parishes. And one of the problems is finding external resources, given that the State contribution – unlike other public research bodies – only covers half of the operating expenses. Researchers have always entered batches, but with long pauses between batches. “The average age is rising, we are struggling to fill the generation turnover”, says Marco Ciotti, when it is pointed out that in the corridors and laboratories you don’t see many thirty-year-olds. And then there is the chronic disease of all Italian research, which pushes many scientists abroad: “Salaries are certainly not competitive. But those who work here are quite good”.
Between past and future, this is the challenge in Frascati: to remain a node, small but of excellence, in the international network that explores the ways of energy, in the midst of the American, Chinese and French giants.

“Should we never get to merger? Of course, there are many competing technologies, many open points that need to be resolved, and it is possible that going up the ladder we will encounter even greater difficulties than expected”, explains Ciotti. “But fusion must continue to be studied, because along the way, on the basis of the technologies we will develop, someone could find the right idea”.