PhysOrg: Fuel for fusion
PhysOrg: Fuel for fusion
By Agatha Bardoel | 6 January 2012
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Fusion Pellet Fueling Lab has been at the center of design and testing of plasma fueling systems for tokamak research applications for decades. Since the mid-1970s, lab researchers have been designing, testing and contributing hardware for fusion magnetic confinement experiments here in the United States and around the world. As the US ITER project moves from design and testing of components to manufacturing, the lab is making prototypes for the ITER tokamak. ITER’s “first plasma” is planned for around the close of this decade.
ORNL researchers David Rasmussen, Steve Combs, Steve Meitner, Larry Baylor, Charles Foust, Dan Fehling, James McGill, John Caughman and Robert Duckworth are among the key players involved in testing pellet injector technology for fueling and for controlling the plasma. The technology then goes to plasma experiments for testing in tokamaks in real-time fueling environments.
The lab’s efforts include work for the JET (Joint European Torus) tokamak in the United Kingdom, currently the largest fusion experiment in the world; for the DIII-D tokamak operated for the US DOE by General Atomics in San Diego; and in the past, for collaborations with France’s Tore Supra and Japan’s Large Helical Device (LHD). When ITER is built in France, it will have a plasma volume that is two times larger than the capacity of any current tokamak.
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