Reply To: Aneutronic fusion and "Tri Alpha Energy Inc."

[jamesr]

Just got back – lots of good talks and posters, as well as usual complement of monotone ones just putting up slide after slide of graphs with no insight into their meaning or implications.

General mood seemed positive for the rate of progress, but still lots of unanswered questions about the understanding of all the phenomena affecting heat and particle transport in tokamaks & stellarators.

Diagnositcs have improved over the last few years on all the various devices round the world like AUG, DIII-D, TEXTOR, TORE SUPRA etc. However there are a lot of phenomena that are seen on some devices and not others. In particular some of the scaling laws do not fit JET (the largest current tokamak) which suggests the understanding of the behaviour once scaled upto ITER’s size is very much in doubt.

Also the role of diffusion coefficients to model the various classical, and turbulent transport mechanisms is becoming more problematic at the plasma edge as the transport here seems to be dominated by blobs of plasma shearing off then being accelerated away towards the wall. If this mechanism is not understood and controlled, too much of the plasma will deposit energy on the proposed beryllium wall of ITER, rather than being safely channeled down to the divertor region at the bottom.

If anyone is interested in any more details on I can try and remember who said what.

Hopefully they’ll post a copy of the group photo taken at the end of the week – I picked that day to wear my FF t-shirt!