Particle Confinement And Exhaust In Magnetically Contained Fusion Plasmas

Plasma Science and Engineering transforms fundamental scientific research into powerful societal applications, from materials processing and healthcare to forecasting space weather. Plasma Science: Enabling Technology, Sustainability, Security and Exploration discusses the importance of plasma research, identifies important grand challenges for the next decade, and makes recommendations on funding and workforce. This publication will help federal agencies, policymakers, and academic leadership understand the importance of plasma research and make informed decisions about plasma science funding, workforce, and research directions.

Graduate-level text examines the essential physics underlying international research in magnetic confinement fusion with accounts of fundamental concepts behind methods of confining plasma at or near thermonuclear conditions. 1992 edition.

A complete and up-to-date summary of power exhaust in fusion plasmas, for academic researchers and graduate students in plasma physics.

This text and software package contains many of the formulae needed for researchers to compute atomic processes, including photoionization, Auger and radiative decay, elastic scattering and ionization. The calculations are set within the Hartree-Fock approximation and its generalization to the random phase approximation with exchange. The results of calculations can be used to solve a wide range of physical problems, from atomic structure to cross sections of collision processes.It explains how to use the ATOM programs, the software for which is written in FORTRAN and may be used on VAX or UNIX-based machines. The programs each consider a different range of variables. The organization of the text and software is designed to help the user calculate what they need to as easily as possible.

As the principles underpinning magnetic confinement are contrary to allowing significant heat flow via charged particles into or out of a magnetically confined plasma, the approach of charged particle beam injection has been largely overlooked. The method of magnetic orbital angular momentum beam acceleration, developed by the PTOLEMY experiment, provides a new avenue for injecting charged particle beams into high magnetic field regions. Initial simulations show how this novel acceleration method can yield charge, mass, and heat flow into toroidal magnetic fields with important implications for fusion energy science. This chapter will review this new method in the context of charged particle beam injection methods and the relevance of these tools for plasma and fusion science.

The book explains how magnetized plasmas self-organize in states of electromagnetic turbulence that transports particles and energy out of the core plasma faster than anticipated by the fusion scientists designing magnetic confinement systems in the 20th century. It describes theory, experiments and simulations in a unified and up-to-date presentation of the issues of achieving nuclear fusion power.

Fusion offers the prospect of virtually unlimited energy. The United States and many nations around the world have made enormous progress toward achieving fusion energy. With ITER scheduled to go online within a decade and demonstrate controlled fusion ten years later, now is the right time for the United States to develop plans to benefit from its investment in burning plasma research and take steps to develop fusion electricity for the nation's future energy needs. At the request of the Department of Energy, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a committee to develop a strategic plan for U.S. fusion research. The final report's two main recommendations are: (1) The United States should remain an ITER partner as the most cost-effective way to gain experience with a burning plasma at the scale of a power plant. (2) The United States should start a national program of accompanying research and technology leading to the construction of a compact pilot plant that produces electricity from fusion at the lowest possible capital cost.