FESAC Toroidal Alternates Panel
The Toroidal Alternate Concepts Panel is a subpanel of the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC). The panel was formed in April 2008 to respond to a charge from Dr. Ray Orbach, the DOE Under Secretary for Science, to assess toroidal alternate concepts for magnetic fusion. The panel has been asked to “critically evaluate the status of, and scientific opportunities for, major alternate magnetic confinement configurations,” which are
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- the stellarator,
- the spherical torus,
- the reversed field pinch, and
- compact tori (spheromak and field-reversed configurations).
Specifically, the panel has been asked to “identify and justify a long-term objective for each concept as a goal for the ITER era,” i.e., the next 15-20 years. Further, the panel has been asked to
- “critically evaluate the goal chosen for each concept, and its merits for fusion development;
- identify and prioritize scientific and technical questions that need to be answered to achieve the specified goal;
- assess available means to address these questions; and
- identify research gaps and how they may be addressed through existing or new facilities, theory and modeling/computation.”
Finally, the charge asks us to “identify and prioritize the unique toroidal fusion science and technology issues that an alternate concept can address, independent of its potential as a fusion energy concept.” The full text of Dr. Orbach’s letter to the FESAC panel can be found here.
The panel consists of 17 scientists from the US fusion research community from universities, national laboratories, and private industry. Six panelists sit on FESAC. Approximately half the panel are experts working on one of the four alternate concepts and the remainder come from the broader fusion community, both theory and experiment. The panel members and their affiliations are provided here.
The panel aims to complete its work in time for approval by the full FESAC in October 2008. This is a tight schedule and we are counting on the support of the community to meet this goal. We have asked the major groups working on these concepts to provide written input addressing the charge questions and we are reviewing these documents now. In addition, the broader fusion community can submit for 2-page web-based contributions here. We are inviting selected representatives from each concept to meet with the full panel June 30-July 2 at the Wyndam Hotel near the Dallas Fort Worth airport. The meeting agenda can be found here. The public is welcome to attend the community input sessions, but space is limited. One hour has been set aside each day for short public comments (by prior arrangement, please). See the DFW Panel Meeting link for further details Overall, we expect this to be an iterative working process between the panel and concept advocates.
We are now studying the community input on the four concepts, reviewing existing documents, and considering prior FESAC reports as we determine next steps in our work. You may want to review these if you are thinking of providing input, in particular, the two-page summaries of concepts from the 1999 FESAC panel report, which gave a 5 year and 20 year view for each concept. A number of documents are available on the Community Input link on this web site.
David N. Hill (Panel Chair)
June 11, 2008
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