the quest for a fusion energy reactor an insiders account of the intor workshop apr 2010

[...]... USA, Tokamak-15 (T-15) in the USSR, Japan Tokamak 60 ( JT60) in Japan, and the most powerful of them all, the Joint European Torus ( JET) in the UK Already in the late 1970s, scientists and engineers at the Kurchatov Institute in Russia, at the Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories and the General Atomics Company in the USA, and at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute ( JAERI) in Nakamura... separate national fusion programs in Europe and was initially opposed Fortunately for the future of ITER, the chairman of the IFRC was Rathbone Sebastian (Bas) Pease, an accomplished scientist and a talented galvanizer of committee action, then head of the U.K fusion program Taking advantage of the fact that the meeting was being held in his language, he masterfully synthesized these three and the equally... Laboratory at Princeton He had already talked with Paul Rutherford, head of the Princeton plasma theory group, and Paul had agreed to be part of the U.S team Jerry Kulcinski, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin and an expert in materials and fusion reactor conceptual design, was a natural choice for the materials and nuclear aspects of the work, and he was interested Frank... perhaps the leading tokamak theorist of the day and head of the principal USSR tokamak fusion program at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow; Gunter Grieger, a plasma physicist and the head of the stellarator plasma confi nement zero phase of the intor workshop (1978–80) 19 program at the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik (IPP) near Munich; and myself, a plasma physicist and nuclear... reactions are charged and thus are also magnetically confi ned within the toroidal plasma chamber, where they transfer their energy to the plasma ions and electrons by collisions The plasma loses energy by radiation and by the transport of particles and energy out of the plasma onto the surrounding material walls In a practical, net power-producing fusion reactor, the high plasma temperatures will have to... escaping plasma ions, that enter the plasma Thus, (3) Confinement and (4) Impurity Control were both high-priority physics topics for the INTOR Workshop assessment The basic force balance on a tokamak plasma is between a confining magnetic pressure that would compress the plasma and an 24 the quest for a fusion energy reactor outward plasma gas kinetic pressure that would expand the plasma Since the fusion. .. thermonuclear temperatures and in increasing the plasma pressure and the length of time that the energy within the plasma could be confi ned before escaping The greatest progress was being made with plasmas confi ned in a toroidal (donut shape) magnetic configuration invented by the Russians and called a tokamak A new generation of large tokamaks was under construction the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) in the. .. authority for the organization and detailed guidance of the Specialist Committee and for the resolution of any issues upon which the specialists could not agree was delegated to a Steering Committee to consist of the leaders of the delegations from the EC, Japan, USSR, and USA The work of this Specialist Committee of fusion experts was to be performed in phases, and at the end of each phase the IFRC would... that would otherwise cause the plasma to lose confinement when beta rose above a certain value Thus, achieving a plasma beta that projected to an economically attractive future fusion reactor was a generally accepted requirement for an EPR For this reason, (5) Stability Control was identified as a physics topical area for assessment in the INTOR Workshop The startup, operation, and shutdown of a large... into the EC at the time, was represented by Donato Palumbo, the head of the EC fusion program, which consisted of several separate national programs (UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden) whose heads also served on the IFRC Australia was also represented The leaders of the four major programs, USA, USSR, EC, and Japan (who jokingly referred to themselves as the “Gang of Four”), together with the . concept for a fusion reactor that was then analyzed in detail. Prob- ably more than a thousand scientists and engineers in Europe, Japan, the USA, and the USSR were involved in this process, and the.