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Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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Latest News
Props and jets
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
A good bit of this month’s edition of Nuclear News is devoted to the latest developments in fusion energy.
While 2024 may not have the punchy investment headlines of ’22, I think it’s fair to say that fusion energy technology is making tangible progress beneath the surface, with unannounced stealth funding plans and the continuation of public-private partnerships.
When will it become a productive element of our global energy architecture? No one knows for sure. There are still myriad challenges to be solved in high-temperature materials, high–critical temperature superconductors, advanced algorithms, and tritium fuel cycle control, just to name a few. But every day, fusion feels a tiny bit more mature, like somehow it has left its childhood bedroom in physics to move into the dorm room of engineering.
T. Morisaki, S. Masuzaki, R. Sakamoto, M. Kobayashi, N. Ohyabu, H. Yamada, A. Komori, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 232-241
Chapter 5. Divertor and Edge Physics | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10810
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To achieve an improvement of plasma confinement by an effective edge plasma control, the local island divertor (LID) was originally proposed in the National Institute for Fusion Science in the early 1980s. The LID is a kind of island divertor that utilizes the island separatrix as the channeling magnetic structure of the divertor, and it has the particular characteristic of localizing the particle recycling in very small areas. Thus, it is possible to construct a compact closed divertor configuration with efficient pumping capability, which results in the low-recycling condition in the edge region. In this paper the LID project is reviewed, from the physics design phase with numerical validation or estimation of the LID principle to a recent experimental result of the superdense core mode, which is a promising discharge for next-generation devices.