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U.S. Burning Plasma Organization e-News
August 15, 2007 (Issue 12)

CONTENTS

Dear Burning Plasma Aficionado:

This newsletter provides a short update on U.S. Burning Plasma Organization activities.  E-News is also available online at http://burningplasma.org/enews.html Comments on articles in the newsletter may be sent to the editor (R. Nazikian rnazikian@pppl.gov) or assistant editor (Emily Hooks ehooks@mail.utexas.edu).

Thank you for your interest in Burning Plasma research in the U.S.!

Director's Corner by J. Van Dam

Picking up on the major theme of last month’s column, let me continue to describe further recent progress with the ITER Design Review activities.

A very important meeting was held July 16-19 at Cadarache, called the Integrated Design Review Meeting. Each of the eight Design Review working groups had a half-day session to present Design Change Requests (DCR). Every DCR had to be in a specific written format, documenting both the reason(s) why the current ITER design is insufficient to address a particular urgent issue as well as the design change that is proposed to deal with it. Leaders and representatives of the eight working groups, leaders from the seven ITER Participant Teams, and ITER Organization top-level managers attended this meeting. Dr. Norbert Holtkamp, Principal Deputy Director General, ran the meeting very efficiently. He pushed to hear about schedules and costs associated with implementing proposed design changes and to make decisions on approval and on budget offsets.

The outcome of this Integrated Design Review Meeting was that about 20 DCRs were accepted, out of 111 submissions. One example of a DCR that was accepted is to carry out a conceptual design study for coils to control resistive wall modes and ELMs. This particular DCR is being shepherded by Dr. Rich Hawryluk, task leader for this area in Working Group 1 (“Design Requirements and Physics Objectives”).

As noted last month, the US Office of Management and Budget had advised DOE that ITER Design Review work during CY 2007 should be funded out of the US ITER Total Project Cost. A guidance letter from the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences further indicated that this work should exceed a de minimis level of a couple weeks to receive such support. With advice from the USBPO, the US ITER Project Office contacted institutions and individuals who are involved in design review work, in order to set up the paperwork for support contracts. This process is now nearly completed.

Due to the importance and the urgency of the design review tasks, the US experts involved in design review activities have plunged ahead and are working diligently. The urgency is driven by the fact that a second Design Review Integration Meeting will be held September 17-19, at which meeting decisions on all changes for the new baseline design will be finalized, so that they can be ready for approval at the ITER Council meeting to be held November 29.

The ITER Council has two advisory committees. The Management Advisory Committee (MAC) is supposed to provide advice about the ITER Organization structure and personnel and also about good management principles for the ITER construction phase, related to scheduling, cost controls, and project oversight. The function of the Science and Technology Advisory Committee (STAC) is probably self-evident from its name. A particular charge to the STAC is that it review the proposals from the ITER Organization on the new Project Baseline documents, namely, project specification, overall project schedule, and project plan and cost estimates as resulting from the Design Review. The US members of the MAC are Ed Moses and a to-be-determined interim replacement for Ed Temple (who now works part-time for ITER); the MAC Chair nominee is Bob Iotti (CH2M Hill); and Charlie Baker (SNL) and Jeff Hoy (OFES) are assigned as experts. The US members of the STAC are Rob Goldston (PPPL), Tony Taylor (GA), Stan Milora (ORNL), and myself, along with Erol Oktay (OFES). I appreciate Dennis Whyte (MIT) substituting for me at the first STAC meeting.

The STAC will have two meetings this year, the first to be held September 5-6 and the second in early November. During August, US scientists involved in design review activities will be very busy developing reports and white papers, in order to provide this information to the US members of the STAC and also as input to the second Integrated Design Review Meeting.

The same week in July that the first Integrated Design Review meeting was being held, there was a meeting of the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee in Gaithersburg, MD. I mention the FESAC Meeting because of three talks that were given on the second day: a report about the meeting of the Interim ITER Council (held the previous week in Tokyo) by Dr. Ray Orbach, DOE Undersecretary for Energy; a report about US involvement in the ITER construction project by Dr. Jeff Hoy, US ITER Program Manager at OFES; and a talk about the USBPO and the ITER Design Review Activities that I presented. All of these presentations are available at the FESAC web site (http://www.ofes.fusion.doe.gov/fesac.shtml); the talk I gave is also posted on the USBPO web site (http://burningplasma.org/reference.html).

It’s been a really busy summer with the Design Review activities. All of this extremely important work is building into a crescendo that will culminate in the revised ITER Baseline Design. Personally, I want to thank all of the US experts and members of the USBPO who are devoting significant levels of effort to this vital task.

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Feature Article

ITER Current Drive Analysis by E.F. Jaeger, ORNL

A major design element for ITER involves the optimization of the ion cyclotron heating (ICH) and ion cyclotron current drive (ICCD) for efficient coupling of Fast Waves into the plasma core. The efficiency of ICH depends on the plasma parameters, the wave frequency, and on the toroidal mode structure of the launched waves.  The mode structure depends on the design of the antenna and in particular, on the number, toroidal location, and relative phasing of the antenna current straps.

In a recent ITER design activity, the mode structure of the fast waves and associated current drive efficiency were calculated for a range of ICRH frequencies using the all-orders, full-wave code, AORSA2D [2]. Calculations were performed for frequencies in the range 52-60 MHz. In this range the direct coupling to the ions is minimized and the current drive efficiency is maximized. The antenna spectrum was calculated using the ITER reference antenna geometry with a phasing of -90 degrees (for current drive) between adjacent straps. With the 90 degrees current-strap phasing, the maximum driven current was calculated to be 0.53 MA for a total of 20 MW of absorbed power.

The visualization of the 3D radio frequency (RF) field from simulations is proving to be a valuable tool in understanding the process of absorption. AORSA2D simulations of the 3D RF fields for ITER are shown below in Figure 1. This figure, provided by Sean Ahearn of ORNL, shows the RF field together with the launching antenna on the right. The antenna is 2 m high and located on the low toroidal field side of the plasma. The RF waves launched from the antenna propagate inward and are efficiently absorbed in the plasma core within a single pass.

Further information on these results can be obtained by contacting the Fred Jaeger  (jaegeref@ornl.gov) or Lee Berry at ORNL. (berryla@ornl.gov).

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BPO-Related Meetings

Sep 9-15
Energy Conversion Systems in Tokamak Reactor      
Erice - Italy
           
Sep 10 -13
EUROMAT 2007 -Materials for Fusion Applications   
Nuremberg, Germany        
http://www.euromat2007.fems.org/

Sep 17-20
National Tokamak Planning Workshop 
MIT, Cambridge, MA          
E. Marmar    

Sep 24-28
International Conference on Burning Plasma Diagnostics    
Villa Monastero, Varenna, Italy
http://www.ispp.it/
           
Sep 26-28
11th IAEA Technical Meeting on H-mode and Transport Barrier      
Tsukuba, Japan
http://www-jt60.naka.jaea.go.jp/h-mode-tm-11/
           
Sep 30-Oct 5
8th Int’l Symp. on Fusion Nuclear Technology - ISFNT-8       
Heidelberg, Germany        
http://iwrwww1.fzk.de/isfnt/

Oct 1-3
CDBM, Transport physics and Pedestal ITPA topical group  
Naka Fusion Institute, JAEA
http://www-jt60.naka.jaea.go.jp/itpa-07-naka/index.html

Oct 8-10
10th IAEA Technical Meeting on Energetic Particles in Magnetic Confinement Systems           
Kloster Seeon, Germany
http://www.ipp.mpg.de/ippcms/eng/for/veranstaltungen/konferenzen/iaea_2007/index.html

Nov 12-16
49th APS-DPP Meeting     
Orlando, FL
http://www.aps.org/meetings/unit/dpp/index.cfm

Dec 4-5
Fusion Power Associates Annual Meeting
Fusion Energy: Preparing for the NIF and ITER Era    
DoubleTree, Oak Ridge, TN
http://fusionpower.org/       

Dec 10-14    
13th International Conf. on Fusion Reactor Materials 
Nice, France
http://www-fusion-magnetique.cea.fr/icfrm13/index.html

For more 2007 Fusion Research-related events, visit the USBPO Upcoming Events page online at http://burningplasma.org/events.html.