containment achieved
robh's picture
Posted on:
Friday, August 16, 2013 - 13:51

Field generator prototypes have successfully contained low-temperature plasma (around 100K degrees celsius), a crucial first step towards moving the fusion reactor from theoretical concept to construction.

Achieving this has taken more effort than expected – the research team had hoped that containment at low temperature could be maintained without the need for much field pitching, but temperature variance events were almost always observed within minutes (sometimes even seconds). This didn’t allow a sufficient window for meaningful observations to be made.

As a consequence, prototyping work on poloidal field generators (used to manage containment field pitch) was required earlier than expected and led to an escalation of complexity in the prototyping process. Additional plasma containment specialists were transferred from the magnetoplasma engine project to keep the reactor project on schedule.

Although getting the poloidal generators prototyped and integrated meant successful containment took longer to achieve, it has also allowed the team to achieve much higher containment pressures (and therefore higher reactor temperatures) than had been anticipated under the original project plan. The team therefore expects to be able to make up some of the lost ground and expects to be able to move to high-temperature tests (10-50 million degress celsius) within weeks.

The Neutral Beam Injection (NBI) assemblies required for super-heating plasma for these tests was developed in parallel to the containment field prototyping. At least one NBI assembly will be available in time to begin the high-temp tests of the containment prototype.

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