• Question: What was the first project that you worked on

    Asked by AT-FK on 10 Dec 2021.
    • Photo: Craig Hickman

      Craig Hickman answered on 29 Nov 2021:

      I worked on a project to upgrade an old robot called The TARM which was originally built to perform maintenance on the outside of the JET Fusion Reactor. It is a large, old robot, with lots of quirks, and it was very interesting to bring it back to life by replacing all of the electronics, control systems, and software. It is now used as an experimental platform to discover more about controlling large unwieldy robots that will help maintain fusion reactors.

    • Photo: Hermione Salter

      Hermione Salter answered on 2 Dec 2021:

      Whilst I was still a student, I worked in the tritium department at UKAEA researching the reactions of hydrogen isotopes (the different kinds of hydrogen that we use for fusion fuel).

      I looked into different ways to separate them out, which we need to do as part of our fuel cycle before we can put them into the reactor.

      I also did experiments to see how much hydrogen gets sucked up by different materials, as this tells us if we will have a load of our fuel stuck to the walls of our reactor or our pipework.

      When I came back as a qualified graduate, I used a big laser to measure the temperature and density of the plasma in the reactor!

    • Photo: Helena Livesey

      Helena Livesey answered on 10 Dec 2021:

      I worked on a motor for our robot, MASCOT. We use MASCOT to fix and upgrade the fusion reactor we look after. MASCOT has some motors inside the body that control the arms and they all needed a big upgrade because the motors had got very old. I helped to plan how they would be assembled and check that they would fit.

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