The MIT Tech- Opinion: GUEST COLUMN: Saving Alcator C-Mod
The MIT tech- Opinion: GUEST COLUMN: Saving Alcator C-Mod
By Derek Sutherland | 02 March 2012
The MIT fusion experiment Alcator C-Mod has been slated for cancellation in the presidential budget request for fiscal year 2013, a cut of nearly $18 million to the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) to be enacted in September 2012. The shuttering of this single largest experiment at MIT will be devastating to the research of many of our professional scientists, upwards of 30 graduate students and dozens of undergraduate students at MIT. Luckily, this budget must still be passed by Congress to go into effect, and we need your help now to reverse this decision.
Fusion energy, the power of our sun and other stars, is a promising alternative form of nuclear energy that has the motivating benefits of a nearly unlimited fuel supply in our oceans, zero carbon pollution, and no long-lived radioactive byproducts. Fusion is the energy of our future, and the scientists, engineers and technicians at the PSFC are actively bringing this clean, abundant, secure energy future that much closer to the present. The main fusion energy experiment at MIT, Alcator C-Mod, is one of the major U.S. fusion experiments in operation today. C-Mod is a high magnetic field, compact, high-performance tokamak. Much of current fusion research is dedicated to the development of ITER, a large tokamak that is currently under construction in France that will demonstrate a predominately self-heated fusion reactor system, which is the next step on the path towards an electricity-producing fusion reactor. C-Mod is able to operate with an ensemble of particular conditions that are critical to study for the success of ITER, such as high plasma pressures, which no other tokamak in operation can achieve. Also, necessary current drive methods have been pioneered on C-Mod, such as lower-hybrid current drive, which is very efficient when compared to other methods. To cancel C-Mod is to threaten the success of ITER and ultimately the global fusion reactor initiative as a whole, as well as to remove a critical part of the domestic tokamak fusion research collaboration consisting of three tokamaks, NSTX at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, DIII-D at General Atomics, and C-Mod here at MIT.
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