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December 2002 Newsletter

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December 2002 Newsletter American Nuclear Society Fusion Energy Division December 2002 Newsletter Letter from Chair Meier FED Slate of Candidates Stubbins 15th ANS Topical Meeting on Technology of Fusion Energy Stoller ANS-FED Awards Presented at 15th TOFE Kulcinski News from Fusion Science and Technology Journal Uckan The 2002 Snowmass Fusion Summer Study Sauthoff The FESAC Recommendations for a Strategy for Burning Plasmas Prager Ongoing Fusion Research: – Progress in Inertial-Electrostatic Confinement Fusion Santarius/ Kulcinski/ Ashley International Activities: – The new CIEL Plasma Facing Components in Tore Supra: A Major Step toward Steady-State, High Power Operation Van Houtte – Highlights of 2nd IAEA Technical Meeting on Physics and Technology of IFE Target and Chamber Goodin/ Petzoldt Letter from Chair: Wayne Meier, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA. The past six months have been a very active period for the fusion community, and it is clear that the nuclear aspects of fusion will be receiving more attention in coming years. In July, several hundred fusion scientists and engineers met in Snowmass, Colorado to discuss and compare options for a burning plasma experiment for MFE and next step experiments for IFE. Official top-level findings have been reported widely and can be found on the summer study web site: http://web.gat.com/snowmass/. (Also see the article by Ned Sauthoff in this newsletter). The Snowmass study also laid out the facilities in addition to the burning plasma experiment, whichwill be needed to develop fusion power. Of key interest to the members of the FED is the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF), an accelerator based 14 MeV facility for radiation damage testing, and a Component Test Facility to do nuclear component testing and development. As the fusion program moves toward demonstration of fusion power, the importance of nuclear science and technology will surely increase in importance. After Snowmass, the FESAC burning plasma subpanel carefully considered the findings of the summer study and made recommendations to proceed with a burning plasma experiment (see article by Stewart Prager in this newsletter). In essence, there is broad consensus by the MFE community that a burning plasma experiment should be built as soon as possible. A key recommendation was that the U.S. should seek to rejoin ITER (in case anyone forgot, T is for Thermonuclear), while continuing work on the FIRE option (http://fire.pppl.gov/). In September, Dr. Ray Orbach, Director of the Office of Science, asked FESAC to address the question of whether a 35-year timeline to electric power demonstration (by MFE and/or IFE) is a credible goal. Preliminary findings will be reported by December 2002, and a final report is due in March or April 2003. Development of low activation materials, breeding blanket qualification, tritium supply, and other nuclear-related issues will be important considerations in this planning. As far as division activities, we are currently focused on the 15th Topical Meeting on Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) that will be completed by the time this newsletter hits the press. Currently, we have a program with ~150 papers covering the usual range of topics. My thanks to the organizers and program chairs for their hard work. Your comments on our biennial TOFE would be useful input to the FED Executive Committee. Current membership stands at 673 with 20 new members added since the June meeting. If there are issues or activities you would like the FED leadership to consider, please contact me @ [email protected] or any other member of the FED executive committee. FED Slate of Candidates: James Stubbins, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, Urbana, Illinois The slate of candidates for the upcoming Fusion Energy Division (FED) of the American Nuclear Society is now complete. All FED members will receive a ballot early next year. It is important that each member vote in these elections, so please take the time to mark and return your ballot. The outcome of the elections will be announced before the June 2003 ANS Annual Meeting in San Diego. The FED is always looking for members who would like to become more active in the operations of the Division. Please contact Wayne Meier, current FED Chair, if you are interested. The slate of candidates is given below. The current Vice Chair/Chair-Elect, René Raffray of University of California-San Diego, will become FED Chair at the end of the FED Executive Committee meeting in June 2003. We have three spots to fill on the Executive Committee in addition to the spots for Vice Chair/Chair-Elect and Secretary/Treasurer. The candidates for the 2003 FED elections are: Vice Chair: Jake Blanchard (UW-Madison) Secretary/Treasurer: Jeff Latkowski (LLNL) Executive Committee: Said I. Abdel-Khalik (Georgia Tech) (listed in alphabetical order; Henry Chu (GA) three spots available) Charles (Chip) Martin (DNFSB) Ken Schultz (GA) Phil Sharp (INEEL) Dennis Youchison (SNL) 15th ANS Topical Meeting on Technology of Fusion Energy: Roger Stoller, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee The 15th ANS Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) was held as an embedded topical meeting during the 2002 Winter ANS Meeting in Washington, DC from November 18-21. The General Chairman of the meeting was Dr. Roger E. Stoller from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), with Professor Akira Kohyama from Kyoto University and Dr. John D. Sethian of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) serving as Vice-General Chairmen. Dr. Lance L. Snead from ORNL was the Chairman of the Technical Program Committee, assisted by Dr. Masahiro Seki from JAERI and Dr. Dai-Kai Sze from UCSD as Vice-Chairmen. Financial support for the meeting was provided by the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, INEEL, General Atomics, LLNL, NRL, ORNL (UT-Batelle), PNNL, SNL, Kyoto University, and the U.S. DOE. The organizers as well as the other participants would like to express their thanks to these individuals in particular for making it possible to hold the enjoyable symposium banquet at Union Station, and for underwriting the student poster awards. Because this was an embedded topical, there was no separate record of TOFE registrations distinct from the ANS meeting. This makes it difficult to determine the exact attendance, but 45 oral and 101 poster presentations were scheduled in nine oral and two poster session. There were a few no-shows, but about 135 presentations were made. The oral sessions included one that was scheduled to present key data and results from the bilateral collaboration on fusion reactor materials between the U.S. DOE and Japanese universities (formerly MONBUSHO): the JUPITER program. Additional data from the JUPITER program was presented in several posters. The excellent attendance and participation in TOFE can in part be attributed to the U.S.-Japan collaborations and the efforts to attract broader representation from the materials research community. There was also a substantial contribution from researchers involved in inertial confinement fusion. Highlights of the meeting included a keynote address by Dr. Patrick Looney, Assistant Director for Physical Sciences and Engineering from the U.S. President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. He represented the President’s Science Advisor, Dr. Jack Marburger, who was prevented from attending by a last-minute schedule change. Patrick provided a summary of the current administration’s views on fusion research and development. In particular, he discussed those issues related to the upcoming decision on whether or not the U.S. would rejoin the ITER project. Dr. Y. Shimomura from the ITER joint working site in Naka, Japan made an excellent presentation on the current status and schedule of ITER work. A presentation entitled “ITER at Cardarache: An Example of Licensing a Fusion Facility,” by Dr. G. Marbach of the French CEA was presented by Dr. N. Taylor from the UKAEA. As the title implies, this talk summarized the French approach to licensing ITER and provided a good overview of the issues involved for the ultimate host country. Dr. A. Kohyama discussed the perceived importance of fusion making a relatively early (< 40 years) contribution to electrical generation in order to maintain public support and interest, and referred to public information activities being carried out in Japan. The desire for an early contribution by fusion was the driving force for novel work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The use of D-3He fusion as a proton source for preparing medical (positron-emitting) isotopes was described in an oral presentation by Dr. G. Kulcinski, and in two posters. Time and space prevents more discussion of the many other authors and presenters who are worthy of mention. Interested parties are encouraged to obtain the proceedings of the symposium. After peer review, complete papers will be published in a special edition of Fusion Science and Technology, which can be pre-ordered from ANS. The meeting organizers and the editor of Fusion Science and Technology recognized several students for their research presented in the poster sessions. There was a tie for the Best Poster Award. The following two students received a $500 cash award from the TOFE, and a page-charge waiver from the Fusion Science and Technology journal if the paper is submitted within one year: S. G. Durbin, Georgia Tech, “Turbulent Liquid Sheets for Protecting IFE Reactor First Walls,” and B. B. Cipiti, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Cathode Embedded D-He3 Fusion Reactions in Inertial Electrostatic Confinement.” The following nine students received Honorable Mention and were awarded a Cross pen set. In addition, the first two authors also received a page-charge waiver from the Fusion Science and Technology journal for a paper submitted within one year: R. Sugano, Kyoto University J. W. Weidner, University of Wisconsin-Madison A.
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