| IAEA Conference on Fusion Energy | | Date Created: Nov 10, 2004, 08:02 AM |
 A report from the 20th IAEA Conference on Fusion Energy held last week at the small resort town of Vilamoura, Portugal.
My first observation is size. I've been attending these meetings for more 16 years, and the number of participants attending each meeting grows. I don't know the exact count, but there were well over 500 scientists from around the world. The larger numbers of
Europeans and Japanese scientists were particularly noticed. Several meetings encouraging further international collaborations in fusion research were held. With the growing success of the Chinese fusion program (their construction of the superconducting "EAST" tokamak) made interest in stronger Chinese-U.S.
collaboration very welcome. |
 My second observation was the quality of fusion-plasma "imagery". High-speed diagnostics and image processing were everywhere. Movies of plasma dyanamics and of realistic computer simulations of plasma dynamics made a big impression on me. Previously, I could only visualize the complex motion of magnetized plasma in my
mind. I would make line graphs of data measured at localized positions around a torus. Now, I could see the whole thing! Long, stretched-out flux tubes of hot plasma would be accelerated at high-speeds to the vacuum vessel walls of the magnetic containment experiment. These are laboratory equivalents to the coronal loops at the surface of our sun. When the first pictures from the SOHO and TRACE satellites appeared 10 years ago, I remember feeling the same way: it was like a child walking past a toy store, day after day, and finally earning the opportunity to walk inside and see everything with eye's open.
Third observation: the remarkable advancements in high-temperature plasma control tools. RF waves, beams, current-drive, external coils, passive and active feedback. Today's fusion device is covered with actuators. It seemed complicated to me, but it
worked!
Finally, I noted science and basic physics alive and well. Two talks were particularly impressive: Mike Zarnstorff and Stewart Prager. They spoke of quasi-symmetric stellarator and reversed field pinch experiments.
Figure at top: Frame from the neutron tomography images of the Joint European Torus (JET) experiment. Small puffs of tritium were injected at the edge of the plasma, and tomographic movies could trace the particle transport of the fusion fuel. Beautiful. |
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