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NUCLEAR FUSION Half a Century of Magnetic Con®Nement Fusion Research NUCLEAR FUSION Half a Century of Magnetic Con®nement Fusion Research NUCLEAR FUSION Half a Century of Magnetic Con®nement Fusion Research C M Braams and P E Stott Institute of Physics Publishing Bristol andPhiladelphia # IOP Publishing Ltd 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Multiple copying is permitted in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency under the terms of its agreement with Universities UK (UUK). British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0 7503 0705 6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available Commissioning Editor: John Navas Production Editor: Simon Laurenson Production Control: Sarah Plenty Cover Design: Fre de rique Swist Marketing: Nicola Newey and Verity Cooke Published by Institute of Physics Publishing, wholly owned by The Institute of Physics, London Institute of Physics Publishing, Dirac House, Temple Back, Bristol BS1 6BE, UK US Oce: Institute of Physics Publishing, The Public Ledger Building, Suite 1035, 150 South Independence Mall West, Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA Typeset by Academic Technical, Bristol Printed in the UK by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall To Lieke and Olga Thanks for your patience and encouragement Contents Preface xi Prologue xiii 1 The road to Geneva 1 1.1 The scienti®c roots 1 1.1.1 Fusion energy in stars 1 1.1.2 Fusion reactions on Earth 4 1.1.3 The origins of plasma physics 7 1.2 In andout of secrecy 16 1.2.1 Programmes taking shape 16 1.2.2 Looking behindthe curtain 20 1.2.3 The roadto travel 26 2 Geneva 1958 31 2.1 Fast linear pinches or Z-pinches 31 2.2 Steady-state mirror con®nement 35 2.3 Pulsedmirrors andtheta pinches 40 2.4 Stellarators 43 2.5 Toroidal pinches 49 2.6 RF ®elds and other subjects 52 2.7 Looking back at Geneva 53 3 Open systems 56 3.1 Simple mirror machines 56 3.1.1 Mirror loss 57 3.1.2 The quest for burnout 58 3.1.3 MHD stability 61 3.1.4 Velocity-space instabilities in mirror machines 64 3.2 Tandem mirrors 68 3.3 Z-pinch andplasma focus 75 3.4 Theta pinches 80 3.5 Unconventional schemes 84 3.6 The status of open systems 89 vii viii Contents 4 Pulsed toroidal systems and alternative lines 90 4.1 High-beta stellarators 90 4.2 Stabilizedandreversed-®eldpinches 92 4.3 Screw pinches 103 4.4 Field-reversed con®gurations and spheromaks 105 4.5 Internal-ring devices 114 4.6 Unconventional toroidal schemes 120 4.7 Status of alternative toroidal systems 122 5 Stellarators versus tokamaks 124 5.1 Stellarators: Bohm diusion or not? 124 5.2 Tokamaks: from Geneva to Novosibirsk 129 5.3 Diagnosing the plasma 134 5.4 Stellarators trailing tokamaks 143 6 The dash to tokamaks 152 6.1 The tokamak goes abroad152 6.2 Neutral beam heating 157 6.3 Disruptions anddensitylimits 159 6.4 Sawteeth 161 6.5 Passing through purgatory 164 6.6 Hydrogen recycling and refuelling 168 6.7 Divertors 170 6.8 Neoclassical theory 172 6.9 Empirical scalings 176 7 The next generation 179 7.1 New machines 179 7.2 Radio-frequency heating 184 7.3 Non-inductive current drive 187 7.4 The switch to carbon 189 7.5 Beta limits 191 7.6 Con®nement degradation 192 7.7 The H-mode 195 7.8 Attempts to understand con®nement 197 7.9 Transport codes 200 8 The era of the big tokamaks 202 8.1 Building the big tokamaks 202 8.1.1 JETÐthe Joint European Torus 203 8.1.2 TFTRÐthe Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor 206 8.1.3 JT-60 207 8.2 Operation andresults 210 8.2.1 Heating the big tokamaks 210 Contents ix 8.2.2 Keeping clean 212 8.2.3 Pushing to higher performance 214 8.2.4 Real fusion power at last 217 8.2.5 The endof the era 221 8.3 Improving the tokamak 221 8.3.1 Reactor-relevant divertor physics 222 8.3.2 Advanced tokamak scenarios 223 8.3.3 Spherical tokamaks 225 8.4 Towards ignition 227 9 Towards a fusion reactor 230 9.1 First thoughts 230 9.2 Secondthoughts 233 9.3 Pioneering studies 236 9.4 Drawing ®re 240 9.5 Economic andsocial aspects of fusion 244 9.6 Joining forces for the `next step' 247 9.7 ITER 249 9.7.1 The ITER EDA design 250 9.7.2 The physics basis 253 9.7.3 Decision andindecision 255 9.7.4 Back to the drawing board 258 10 Epilogue 261 References 270 Symbols 298 Glossary 301 Index315 Figures The authors gratefully acknowledge the following organizations and individuals for granting permission to reproduce ®gures and illustrations. Copyright in these materials remains with the original publishers: EFDA-JET (®gures 5.4, 6.1, 6.5, 7.2, 8.1, 8.5, 8.6, 9.1 and 9.3), Elsevier Scienti®c (®gures 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.7, 3.1, 4.8, 4.11, 4.12, 4.13, 5.3, 6.6a and the ®gure in box 2.4), Euratom-UKAEA Fusion Association Culham (®gures 1.5, 1.8, 2.10 and 8.8), General Atomics (Dr T N Carl- strom for ®gure 5.7), International Atomic Energy Agency (®gures 3.3, 3.5, 3.9, 3.12, 3.13, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.5, 4.14, 5.2, 5.5, 5.8, 5.10, 6.6b, 6.9 and 7.1), International Ther- monuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) (®gure 9.4), Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (®gure 8.3), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (®gures 3.4, 3.8, 4.7 and 4.10), Max-Planck-Institut fuÈ r Plasmaphysik, Garching (Dr H Wobig for ®gures 2.8 and 5.9 and Professor F Wagner for ®gures 5.12, 7.3 and 8.7), National Institute for Fusion Science (®gure 5.11), Nature Publishing Group and Dr N J Peacock (®gure 5.6), Oxford University Press and Dr J Wesson (®gures 6.2 and 6.7), Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (®gures 5.1, 6.3, 8.2 and 8.4) and Trilateral Euregio Cluster (TEC) (®gure 6.4). Every eort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The authors will be pleased to make good in any future editions any errors or omissions that are brought to their attention. Some ®gures have been redrawn or modi®ed by the authors, in particular ®gures 1.1 and 1.2 after Raeder J et al. 1986 Controlled Nuclear Fusion (Chichester: Wiley); ®gure 1.4 after Alfve n H 1950 Cosmical Electrodynamics (Oxford: Clarendon Press); ®gure 1.9 after Glasstone S and Lovberg R H 1960 Controlled Thermonuclear Reac- tions (Princeton: D van Nostrand); ®gures 2.5 and 2.6 after Rose D J and Clark M 1961 Plasmas and Controlled Fusion (Cambridge: MIT Press); ®gure 3.6 after Kawabe T 1983 Varenna Course on Mirror-Based and Field-Reversed Approaches to Magnetic Fusion 1 43; ®gure 3.7 after Kumazawa R 1983 9th Conf. Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research, Baltimore, 1982, Nucl. Fusion Suppl. (Vienna: IAEA) 1 566; ®gure 3.10 after Mather J W and Williams AH 1966 Physics of Fluids 9 2080; ®gure 4.4 after Baker D Aand Quinn W E 1981 The Reversed-Field Pinch, chapter 7 in Fusion 1A ed. E Teller (New York: Academic Press); ®gure 4.9 after Momota H 1992 Fusion Techn. 21 2309; ®gure 6.8 after various sources; ®gure 9.2 after Moir R W 1972 4th Conf. Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research, Madison, 1971, Proceedings Series (Vienna: IAEA) 3 315 and 1975 5th Conf. Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research, Tokyo, 1974, Proceedings Series (Vienna: IAEA) 3 589. Figures 1.3, 1.6, 1.7, 2.9, 3.2, 3.14, 4.6, 4.15 and those in boxes 2.1, 2.3, 5.2 and 7.2 were produced by the FOM Institute Rijnhuizen, which gladly waives its copyrights. x Preface Physicists who ®rst cast an eye on the problem of the peaceful use of thermo- nuclear energy, aroundthe middleof the twentieth century, soon realizedthat to try something andsee what might happen wouldget them nowhere until they understood more of plasma physics. But although plasmas occur widely in nature, indeed most of the known matter in the universe is in the plasma state, this area of physics hadbeen largely neglected.When relativity andquantum mechanics hadpresentedthemselves in the early years of the twentieth century as the areas where the greatest advances in physics were to be made,the unexploredlandbetween Newtonian mechanics andMaxwellian electromagnetism was simply overlooked. Astronomers and gas discharge physicists were the ®rst to become aware of this omission andto take steps to correct it and, when the thermonuclear problem came up, they were among the ®rst to bring their expertise to bear on the subject. In the course of the 1950s this developedinto a recognizednew branch of physics andas this unfolded, controlled thermonuclear research, or fusion research as it came to be known, evolvedfrom basic to appliedplasma physics. As it turnedout, of all the magnetic ®eldcon®gurations investigatedfor their capability to con®ne a hot plasma, the tokamak became the leading contender, to the point where we can now proceedto the construction of a test reactor and to contemplate the next step: a prototype commercial reactor.
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