Event
UMD Plasma Physics Seminar: Wednesday, April 7th @3:30 pm
Wednesday, April 7, 2021
3:30 p.m.
via ZOOM
https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~swisdak/PPS/plasma_seminar.html
The next plasma physics seminar will begin at 3:30 pm on Wednesday, April
7th. It will be held on Zoom at this link: https://umd.zoom.us/j/8380649660.
Richard Buttery of General Atomics will be discussing "*The Advanced
Tokamak Path to a Compact Fusion Pilot Plant"*
The abstract:
The Advanced Tokamak concept provides an attractive path to develop a
compact and inexpensive "pilot plant" to demonstrate net electricity and
resolve nuclear technology and breeding. It works through a fortuitous
alignment of high pressure operation with strong self-driven "bootstrap"
current and low turbulent transport. Here, great research progress in
transport, pedestal, stability and energetic particle physics has
identified the key principles behind a solution, which will be explained in
this talk. Furthermore, new "full physics" simulations show the trade-offs
and path to optimize the approach: raising pressure increases fusion
performance, but increasing the density has greater leverage, raising
bootstrap current and decreasing auxiliary current drive demands from
expensive RF systems. The efficient solutions found have high energy
confinement, reducing the necessary fusion performance, heat and neutron
loads for a net electric goal. Viable devices are predicted with a compact
major radius of ~4m radius giving 200MW electricity at ~6T using
conventional superconductors, or better still using high Tc superconductors
at 7T, which provides greater performance margins and permits easier
maintenance for the nuclear research mission. The plasma exhaust is managed
by a combination of core radiation, flux expansion and radiative divertor,
although the challenges continuous operation require further configuration
research to reduce erosion. Overall this Compact Advanced Tokamak (CAT)
approach provides an attractive and robust path to fusion energy, with high
performance and stability. Further exciting research is underway at the
DIII-D National Fusion Facility and elsewhere to validate the approach and
test key technologies to make such a device a reality.
The full schedule for this semester can be found at
https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~swisdak/PPS/plasma_seminar.html
