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 completed its work and reported back to FESAC on November 6, 2008.

► The link to the final report is contained here.

The panel was asked to "critically evaluate the status of, and scientific opportunities for, major alternate magnetic confinement configurations," which are

• • the stellarator,
  • the spherical torus,
  • the reversed field pinch, and
  • compact tori (spheromak and field-reversed configurations).

Specifically, we were 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 by addressing four questions:

1. "critically evaluate the goal chosen for each concept, and its merits for fusion development;
2. identify and prioritize scientific and technical questions that need to be answered to achieve the specified goal;
3. assess available means to address these questions; and
4. identify research gaps and how they may be addressed through existing or new facilities, theory and modeling/computation."

The panel consisted of 17 scientists from the US fusion research community from universities, national laboratories, and private industry. Six panelists came from FESAC. Approximately half the panel consisted of experts working on one of the four alternate concepts and the remainder came from the broader fusion community, both theory and experiment. The panel members and their affiliations are provided here.

The panel counted on and received strong support by the fusion community to meet its goal. We asked the major groups working on these concepts to provide written input addressing the charge questions and received many documents. In addition, the broader fusion community was invited to submit 2-page web-based contributions, linked here.

Representatives from each concept were invited 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 was also invited to attend the community input sessions, but space was limited: 23 scientists participated. One hour was set aside each day for short public comments. Overall, this was an iterative working process between the panel and concept advocates.

We also reviewed existing documents and considered prior FESAC reports during the course of our work. The two-page summaries of concepts from the 1999 FESAC panel report, which gave a 5 year and 20 year view for each concept were especially helpful. A number of documents are available on the Community Input link on this web site.

David N. Hill (Panel Chair)
December 5, 2008