Written by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. Edited by Ignas Galvelis, Supervising Director. At the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (MPIPP) in Greifswald Germany, a team of scientists and engineers continue working to bring the worlds largest stellarator online. A stellarator is a type of toroidal magnetic confinement fusion reactor. The most common form of toroidal fusion reactor is a tokamak. Tokamaks are shaped like ordinary doughnuts. Stellarators retain the basic doughnut shape but twists its way around to make the loop. This design, while far more complex, allows physicists to craft more ideal magnetic confinement fields. The machine under construction in Germany is called the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X). The W7-X was first powered up at the end […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. Edited by Ignas Galvelis, Supervising Director. A team of Princeton University researchers hope to create fusion power rockets. One proposed use would be to enable rapid mission payloads to Pluto. The New Horizons spacecraft ended a nine year journey to Pluto in 2015 with a dramatic flyby. A fusion driven mission could deliver both an orbiter and lander to Pluto in just four years. Princeton Satellite Systems (PSS) and the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL) are collaborating to develop Direct Fusion Drive: a revolutionary direct-drive, fusion-powered rocket engine. The rocket engine being designed by PSS uses magnetic confinement to create a ring of plasma. This plasma would be composed of deuterium and […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. Edited by Ignas Galvelis, Supervising Director. In March an international team of physicists reported on a novel approach to nuclear fusion. Foregoing the standard containment approaches, they propose using ultra-short bursts of lasers to nudge nuclei together. These photonic nudges could be used to provide the conditions for nuclei to overcome their electrostatic repulsion until the strong force could take over. Once nuclei are in close enough proximity the chance of fusion reaction becomes much more likely. Scientists from Rice University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Chile collaborated on a two dimensional simulation between deuterium and tritium. Authors Peter Wolynes of Rice, Martin Gruebele of Illinois and […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. Edited by Ignas Galvelis, Supervising Director. A team of European scientists has published findings revealing a better understanding of plasma dynamics allowing tokamak designs to take another step forward. In tokamak reactors, a catastrophic effect can occur known as runaway electrons. In these scenarios, free electrons in the plasma can form coherent currents of as much as one million amperes. These electron currents have the potential to breach the plasma containment fields and cause serious damage to the reactor. In a recent Letter to Physical Review, the team describe a method for countering such rogue currents thereby protecting the reactor from damage. Their method entails injecting neon (atomic number 10) or argon […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. Edited by Ignas Galvelis, Supervising Director. After 6.3 sextillion (6.3×10^21) CPU cycles of the Titan super computer running at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a team of researchers has successfully simulated the spontaneous transition of turbulence at the edge of a fusion plasma from low confinement mode (L-mode) magnetic containment to high confinement mode (H-mode). It took three days for Titan to run this simulation. The simulation itself was modeling a mere 270 microseconds of real time plasma behavior. U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) physicists utilized 90 percent of Titan’s capacity during that three-day time-slot. The Titan machine is the nation’s most powerful supercomputer for […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. Edited by Ignas Galvelis, Supervising Director. Last fall Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Fusion (LPP Fusion) Chief Scientist Eric Lerner was the featured speaker for the New York City Physics and Astronomy Meetup groups. Fortunately, the event was captured on video and recently released as a YouTube video series named ”The New Race to Fusion.” Mr. Lerner spoke to the assembled groups for over an hour on the current state of fusion research including his own. He also touched on the background of several ongoing fusion efforts, as well as their best fusion results. Most interesting were the comparisons made between these current outcomes and those of his own Focus Fusion-1 device. Based on a […]
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