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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.
A. Komori, T. Morisaki, T. Mutoh, S. Sakakibara, Y. Takeiri, R. Kumazawa, S. Kubo, K. Ida, S. Morita, K. Narihara, T. Shimozuma, K. Tanaka, K. Y. Watanabe, H. Yamada, M. Yoshinuma, T. Akiyama, N. Ashikawa, M. Emoto, H. Funaba, M. Goto, T. Ido, K. Ikeda, S. Inagaki, M. Isobe, H. Igami, K. Itoh, O. Kaneko, K. Kawahata, T. Kobuchi, S. Masuzaki, K. Matsuoka, T. Minami, J. Miyazawa, S. Muto, Y. Nagayama, Y. Nakamura, H. Nakanishi, Y. Narushima, K. Nishimura, M. Nishiura, A. Nishizawa, N. Noda, S. Ohdachi, Y. Oka, M. Osakabe, N. Ohyabu, T. Ozaki, B. J. Peterson, A. Sagara, K. Saito, R. Sakamoto, K. Sato, M. Sato, T. Seki, M. Shoji, S. Sudo, N. Tamura, K. Toi, T. Tokuzawa, K. Tsumori, T. Uda, T. Watari, I. Yamada, M. Yokoyama, Y. Yoshimura, O. Motojima, LHD Experimental Group, C. D. Beidler, T. Fujita, A. Isayama, Y. Sakamoto, H. Takenaga, P. Goncharov, K. Ishii, M. Sakamoto, S. Murakami, T. Notake, N. Takeuchi, S. Okajima, M. Sasao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 136-145
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1229
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Remarkable progress to access the reactor-relevant regime has been made in a recent experiment in the Large Helical Device. Optimizing the rotational transform, the average beta value of 4.3%, which is the highest record among helical devices, was achieved. The high-performance plasma with a fusion triple product up to ~2.2 × 1019 m-3keVs was sustained for >7 s by repetitive hydrogen pellet injection. With regard to steady-state operation, which is one of the key issues to realize a fusion reactor, discharges for >30 min were successfully sustained by ion cyclotron range of frequency heating with the aid of the magnetic axis swing technique to reduce the heat load to the plasma-facing component. In the discharge, the total input energy to the plasma reached 1.3 GJ, which also established a new record.