Cooperation and Competition on the Path to Fusion Energy: A Report (1984)

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3 TECHNICAL NEEDS AND OPPORTUNITIES Within the worldwide magnetic fusion programs, a significant case can be made for international cooperation on the basis of maximizing the rate of progress by obtaining and sharing scientific and technical information. There is a long tradition of friendly competition and sharing in all basic science research, although as potential applications develop, access to information tends to get more restrictive. In fusion, from the earliest days, there have been significant cooperative ventures. This chapter examines the broad technical characteristics of the magnetic fusion programs of the United States, the European Community (EC), and Japan to assess whether there are technical needs and opportunities suitable for cooperative efforts. The current status of the programs themselves and the record of past and current cooperation form the basis for identifying types of future possibilities that seem attractive, although it is left to those responsible for program definition to propose particular candidate projects. Cooperation can take many forms but a reasonably complete listing consists of the following: o International meetings and conferences. o Personnel exchanges and joint research involving individuals or small groups. o Joint planning aimed at coordination of research and maximum use of facilities. o Joint programs on national facilities. o Cooperative design, construction, and operation of major facilities. Technical needs for basic information, technology development, and major experimental facilities are covered in the discussions of the above categories. 34

35 STATUS OF THE PROGRAMS The comparative status of the U.S., EC, and Japanese programs may be seen in broad perspective from Table l. All are of comparable, although not identical, magnitude as measured by funding rates and personnel levels. The tokamak configuration is one of the mainline elements of the U.S. program and the only mainline element of the EC and Japanese programs. The second mainline effort in the United States is the magnetic mirror configuration. One or more of the alternative confinement concepts, such as the stellarator, reversed- field pinch, compact toroid, and bumpy torus, are being pursued in each program. The development of a number of advanced technologies, necessary for magnetic fusion energy, is being pursued most extensively in the United States and increasingly in the EC and Japan. These technologies include superconducting magnets, plasma heating by radio-frequency energy and energetic particle beams, and methods of safely handling the radioactive isotope tritium. Other technologies include the development of materials able to withstand both surface and bulk effects of a reacting plasma and the investigation of blankets to absorb the energetic neutrons that carry away the energy produced in the reacting plasma and convert it to a useful form. (See National Research Council, l982, for further discussion of the above topics.) In the United States, major program efforts are located in the laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), mainly Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Plasma Physics Laboratory (at Princeton University), Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Argonne National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and Hartford Engineering Development Laboratory. In addition, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other major universities have significant programs. A major DOE-funded tokamak program is also located at GA Technologies, Incorporated, in San Diego, California. The physics of plasma confinement will be studied using the existing Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Plans for a variety of follow-on machines, one of which is called the Tokamak Fusion Core Experiment (TFCX), have been discussed; but there is no commitment at present. Magnetic mirror confinement will be studied by the Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF), under construction at LLNL. The pace of the U.S. program is to be determined by technical results, available resources, and perceived programmatic benefit. In the EC the major installation, the Joint European Torus (JET), is located near Abingdon, in Oxfordshire, England. Work that is a part of the EC program is also being conducted by the United Kingdom at Culham Laboratory; by the Federal Republic of Germany at Garching, Karlsruhe, and Julich; by France at Fontenay-aux-Roses, Grenoble, and Cadarache; and by Italy at Milan, Frascati, and Padua. Smaller activities are located in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland. The European program is managed as an entity by the

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37 Commission of the European Communities, headquartered in Brussels. The work on JET and some smaller scale studies at the Joint Research Center of the EC, at Ispra, Italy, are joint activities of the member countries. (See Commission of the European Communities, l984b.) The broad intent of the EC program is to obtain from JET as much information as is possible about a plasma near the reacting level. Discussion and study is currently under way on the design of a machine called the Next European Torus (NET), which will use a deuterium-tritium (D-T) plasma reacting for a duration of more than l00 seconds per observation and which will test reactor-relevant technologies (NET Team, l984). Finally a demonstration machine is contemplated to prove engineering feasibility. The main line of the Japanese program is carried out by the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI), under the Science and Technology Agency (STA). It is this organization that is constructing and will operate the large JT-60 tokamak and investigate the associated technology (Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, l982). The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture (Monbusho, after its Japanese acronym) conducts a program of basic scientific and technological research in universities (Uchida, l983). This program has funding comparable to the program of JAERI. The program investigates several confinement concepts including tokamak, tandem mirror, stellarator, reversed-field pinch, compact toroid, and bumpy torus. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) is observing progress with interest, but so far MITI is not so heavily involved as the other two agencies. The program is coordinated through an advisory body, the Nuclear Fusion Council, reporting through the Atomic Energy Commission to the Prime Minister's office. The long-term Japanese plans are to verify, using JT-60, the physics of confinement and the attainability of the necessary conditions of density and temperature in a hydrogen plasma for fusion to occur. Dependent on favorable results, planning is underway for a device called the Fusion Experimental Reactor (FER) , to be constructed to study the operation and the technology associated with a fully reacting D-T plasma. Presumably some sort of prototype or demonstration will follow FER, but such plans are not definite at this time. PRIOR COOPERATION Research in the early days of fusion was classified, in the mistaken belief that success would come easily and great advantages would accrue to the first country to harness fusion power. The first major open exchange of information came in l958 at a conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy in Geneva. Following that conference, more normal kinds of scientific interaction appeared in the fusion

38 community. For example, the United States and the United Kingdom concluded an early agreement (Cockcroft-Libby) for cooperation. One early example of experimental cooperation was the measurement of the electron temperature in an early Soviet tokamak by a British team. This measurement convinced the community that the tokamak configuration used by the Soviets was successfully improving plasma confinement. There are also numerous examples of useful collaboration between the USSR and the United States in the area of magnetic mirror devices such as the invention of the "minimum magnetic field" configuration and the tandem mirror. These activities predated the l973 Nixon-Brezhnev agreement on cooperation in nuclear energy and have continued. The U.S. fusion community went to considerable effort in l983 to document the technical value of the U.S.-USSR cooperation and justify continuation of the agreement. Interactions between the United States and the EC have also been extensive although quite informal in the sense of government-to- government agreements. There are, however, numerous instances of joint work and personnel exchanges, which were fruitful scientifically, especially on toroidal confinement systems, among them the stellarator and the reversed-field pinch. Significant interaction with the Japanese has been more formal, with major activity following the agreement signed in l979 on cooperation in energy research. Under this umbrella agreement, activity in joint planning, personnel exchanges, joint workshops, and even joint operation of facilities has flourished. These activities are discussed in detail in the following sections on present and future cooperation. In fusion technology there has always been significant sharing of experimental and diagnostic technologies. In more recent years where specialized technologies such as neutral-beam heating of plasmas developed, there ensued international collaborations very similar to those on the scientific side. Typically the United States has been at the forefront in most of these areas, an exception being the gyrotron microwave source for electron cyclotron resonance heating, invented and developed in the USSR but perfected and made widely available by the U.S. program. Other than interaction at meetings and personnel exchanges, the majority of technology collaborations has occurred under the auspices of international agencies. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) sponsors the International Tokaraak Reactor (INTOR) study plus numerous meetings, workshops, and the scientific journal, Nuclear Fusion. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which includes the EC, the United States, and Japan but not the USSR, is the vehicle for the Large Coil Task (Haubenreich, l983), the TEXTOR work, and considerable work in fusion materials.

39 CURRENT ACTIVITY Meetings, Workshops, and Personnel Exchanges International scientific and technical meetings abound in fusion and fusion technology under the sponsorship of numerous groups. Of the international agencies, the IAEA is particularly active. Its meetings and workshops, especially the biennial meeting on fusion, are one of the few vehicles for significant interaction with the Soviets. Currently bilateral agreements exist, which formalize and balance the flow of people, between the United States and the USSR, and between the United States and Japan. In fact, outside of international meetings, nearly all of the U.S. interaction with Japan and the USSR is handled in a formal way, typically by agreeing once a year to a rather detailed agenda of cooperative activities. Additional interactions take place through normal scientific channels. One activity that deserves special note is the INTOR workshop, which is a unique form of international cooperation midway between scientific workshop and a joint planning activity. The INTOR activity was originally formed as a consequence of a USSR proposal to look at the technical issues of designing and building the next step beyond the current generation of large tokamaks. The cooperation involves teams from the United States, Japan, the EC, and the USSR. The mode of operation is national teams working on parallel tasks and meeting two or three times a year for several weeks in Vienna to critically discuss results and to plan future work. The activity was successful in identifying critical issues in both the physics and technology of fusion. Most people believe it is unlikely that the INTOR machine will be built, but a large number of significant insights have come out of the study. The approach is an excellent model for other activities. Joint Planning Currently, formal joint planning is restricted to an agreement with Japan. The major components are: (l) the program of the Joint Institute for Fusion Theory, a collaboration between the Institute of Fusion Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the Institute for Controlled Fusion Theory at Hiroshima University; (2) joint planning in each of the principal science areas, namely, tandem mirror, stellarator, compact toroid, bumpy torus, and the JT-60 and TFTR experiments; and (3) a cooperative planning activity, which is part of a technology exchange, between the Japanese FER design team and U.S. designers. Informally, a great deal of joint planning, currently being formalized under the IEA, goes on between the United States, Japan, and the EC, primarily to coordinate experimental programs on the large

40 facilities. Coordination also exists between the U.S. and Japanese compact-toroid and bumpy-torus communities and between the U.S., EC, and Japanese reversed-field pinch experiments at Los Alamos, Padua, Culham, and various locations in Japan. In technology there is growing coordination between the United States and Japan, particularly in material sciences; and cooperation is under discussion in a number of other areas. Most recently, in l982, initial discussions, which have continued, have been held between workers in the United States and those in the growing EC technology program. Naturally, the cooperatively operated facilities involve considerable joint planning. In addition, normal scientific interactions involve discussions that tend to coordinate technical programs either to avoid duplication or to verify important experimental or theoretical results. Joint Programs on National Facilities There are currently a number of national facilities with joint programs in the fusion program. TEXTOR is a medium-sized, state-of-the-art tokamak in Julich, Federal Republic of Germany. Because of its excellent vacuum and plasma conditions and precisely defined and controlled plasma boundary, an international program in plasma edge science and plasma surface interactions has developed. The program is sponsored by the IEA; and involves experimental teams from the United States, Japan, and the EC. The facility is operated by the Germans, and the other teams generally build and bring their own experimental hardware. All results are shared so that each partner is spared the need of carrying on an equivalent effort alone. The Rotating Target Neutron Source II (RTNS-II) is a high intensity dual (4 x l()l3 neutrons/second) l4-million electronvolt neutron source at LLNL in the United States. The facility was built for DOE and is operated by LLNL. Because DOE was never financially able to operate both neutron sources, an agreement was reached with Monbusho to fund operation of the second source. Both partners share in the neutrons produced and the overall experimental program is jointly planned. All results are shared. The Oak Ridge research reactors are funded jointly by the United States and Japan with a jointly planned radiation damage program similar in operation to the one at RTNS-II. Both are part of the U.S.-Japan bilateral agreement. Finally, the Large Coil Task is an effort, organized under IEA, to operate, in a U.S.-funded central facility at ORNL, six large prototypical tokamak 8-tesla coils built by the partners. Three of the coils were built by U.S. firms and one each by the EC, Switzerland, and Japan. All design information ana results are being shared.

41 Major Facilities Currently only one major facility is jointly funded and operated. It is the Doublet III (D-III) tokamak at GA Technologies, Incorporated. An independent subagreement under the U.S.-Japan agreement on energy covers the collaboration, which comes under STA. One of the principal purposes of the agreement was to give a Japanese physics team experience operating a large tokamak prior to the operation of the JT-60 machine in Japan. The cooperation is still active and has resulted in a vigorous and technically valuable program at D-III. FUTURE COOPERATION The technical justification and need for cooperation will continue to exist. If, as this committee recommends, more cooperation is to occur, even to the extent of substantial internationalizing of the program, such activities must make technical sense. This section covers some of the areas where cooperation, if increased, could have substantial impact toward improving the technical productivity of fusion. To be avoided, of course, is narrowing the focus of the program too soon or only seeking lowest common denominator solutions. Meetings, Workshops, and Personnel Exchanges Meetings, workshops, and personnel exchanges will continue to be of great importance even in a highly coordinated program. A coordinated program would provide increased breadth, so that useful cross fertilization between various concepts and various solutions to technology problems will occur. In one case of a highly coordinated program, namely that of the EC, there is an efficient and formal mechanism to allow people to work temporarily in another laboratory. A worldwide coordinated program should also make such opportunities more widely available. Joint Planning Joint planning as a form of implementation of cooperation is discussed at greater length in the next chapter. It is assumed here that future cooperation will involve significant joint planning. Potential Joint Projects The technical success of joint activities up to the present is a major reason that this committee recommends expanded activity in the

42 future. Even though many of the present cooperations were not jointly planned as projects, the program has been jointly planned and technical results have been shared. At the committee's domestic workshops and in its travels to Japan and Western Europe, many suggestions were made for joint activity consistent with technical needs. The rest of this section outlines the physics and technology areas where the committee feels cooperation is needed and technically justified. In many cases such as tokamak physics, multiple facilities with coordinated programs are required simply because of the amount and variety of information needed. In other areas like radiation damage or plasma surface interactions, one facility, or at most a few, would serve the international needs for data, just as accelerator and central computing facilities do. In many ways, the EC program is a good model, within a given political framework, for a centrally planned and coordinated program with distributed facilities. A large-scale program coordinated among the United States, the EC, and Japan might adapt a similar model and procedures. Physics An obvious candidate for cooperation because of cost, is a large-scale tokamak with significant technology goals. Such a machine is envisioned in each of the programs with very similar goals and mission. A number of additional tokamak facilities, each with different emphasis, are also needed to supply data in specific parameter regimes or for special purposes with limiter or divertor configurations. A coordinated program would plan activities at existing facilities or initiate new facilities at institutions where appropriate expertise or related facilities already exist. In the alternative confinement concepts, a coordinated program could carry a greater variety of configurations to the proof-of-principle stage. Even programs with major facilities like the tandem mirror would benefit from coordinated scientific activity in other countries as well as from a joint program on the major facilities. Technology There are already a number of good models where joint programs reduce overlap, for example, TEXTOR, RTNS-II, the Oak Ridge reactors, and the Large Coil Test Facility, although this last project is not yet fully operational. Other technology areas which have been mentioned are: o A large-scale accelerated materials testing facility like the Fusion Materials Irradiation Test, proposed earlier but still lacking agreement.

43 o Development facilities (cryogenics, background coils, and so forth) for very high field magnet development. o Neutral-beam and radio-frequency test stands. o Tritium-handling facilities. o Blanket-technology facilities. o Liquid-metal loops and experimental facilities. o High heat flux test facilities. Another possible joint project, which has been highly successful in the United States, is a computer facility for large-scale plasma and facility modelling. Such a joint resource would similarly provide benefits to other large-scale world programs. RECAPITULATION There is sufficient similarity in the status of development and near- to intermediate-term objectives of the major world fusion programs to provide a technical basis for major international collaboration in the future. A long tradition of cooperation at the level of information and personnel exchange, gradually increasing to the level of joint programs on particular national facilities, shows that past cooperation provides a sound basis for future efforts. Instances of currently successful cooperation give confidence that larger cooperative efforts in the future would also be successful. All the world programs have need for basic information in the physics of plasmas near fusion conditions; for the development of the numerous technologies necessary for fusion devices; and for the design, construction, and operation of major experimental facilities. Meetings, workshops, and personnel exchanges will continue to disseminate useful information about plasma science and the individual fusion technologies. In addition, larger-scale collaboration on joint projects in reactor-relevant physics and technology would also contribute to the solution of those technological problems. Finally, in designing, building, and using the major experimental facilities, there is ample opportunity for joint planning and joint undertakings.