ITER

PPPL has successfully tested a Laboratory-designed device to be used to diminish the size of instabilities known as “edge localized modes (ELMs)” on the DIII–D tokamak that General Atomics operates for the U.S. Department of Energy in San Diego. Such instabilities can damage the interior of fusion facilities.

The PPPL device injects granular lithium particles into tokamak plasmas to increase the frequency of the ELMs. The method aims to make the ELMs smaller and reduce the amount of heat that strikes the divertor that exhausts heat in fusion facilities.

Francis “Rip” William Perkins Jr., a pioneering plasma physicist whose contributions to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) ranged from seminal advances in fusion energy and astrophysical research to the education of a generation of scientists, died on July 26 in Boulder, Colo. He was 80 and had long battled Parkinson’s disease.

Some 35 physicists from around the world gathered at PPPL last week for the second annual Laboratory-led workshop on improving ways to predict and mitigate disruptions in tokamaks. Avoiding or mitigating such disruptions, which occur when heat or electric current are suddenly reduced during fusion experiments, will be crucial for ITER the international experiment under construction in France to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power.

Kenneth Hill and Manfred Bitter are scientific pioneers who have collaborated seamlessly for more than 35 years. Together they have revolutionized a key instrument in the quest to harness fusion energy — a device called an X-ray crystal spectrometer that is used around the world to reveal strikingly detailed information about the hot, charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions.