Fusion News: Science Codex – Plasma experiment demonstrates admirable self-control
Chinese and American scientists have found a way of making fusion energy more cost-effective by having plasma regenerate itself, according to a report in Science Codex titled “Plasma experiment demonstrates admirable self-control.”
In the tokamak configuration, the confining magnetic field is generated by external coils and by an electric current flowing within the plasma. The cost of driving these currents has a strong impact on the economic attractiveness of a fusion reactor based on the tokamak approach. One step to minimizing this cost is to make the external coils of superconducting wire. The second step is to take full advantage of a surprising feature of the tokamak configuration: under certain conditions the electric current in the plasma can be generated by the plasma itself (“bootstrap” current).
Dr. Andrea Garofalo, General Atomics Scientists, remarked on the recent experiment:
It is often said that a plasma with a high fraction of self-generated (bootstrap) current would be difficult to control. However, these experiments show that a high bootstrap fraction plasma is very stable against transients: the plasma seems to ‘like’ a state where a large fraction of the current is self-generated.
