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Suggested Citation:"Introduction and Background." National Research Council. 1995. Plasma Science: From Fundamental Research to Technological Applications. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/4936.
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Page 80

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MAGNETIC CONFINEMENT FUSION 80 of present conceptual designs of the divertor to handle the intense power loads with sufficient safety margin or lifetime. Attention has returned to certain old, though still-untested, ideas and recent variations on how to widen the thin power-carrying scrapeoff layer. Ergodization of field lines is under scrutiny. Another scheme relies on the injection of cold gas into the scrapeoff layer to reduce, by charge exchange, the power carried to the divertor plate by plasma ions. Intense radiation, mainly by impurities entrained in the plasma flow toward the divertor plate, may be able to drain the power out of the electron channel. At the extreme, a completely successful embodiment of these approaches would result in volumetric plasma recombination and the replacement of a solid divertor plate by a gas target (an idea that originated in 1974). The fluid codes presently used to model the scrapeoff layer do not represent a sufficiently accurate description of the physical processes. These must be improved by the direct incorporation of kinetic effects, drift motion, nonambipolar flows, and better atomic physics. With such improvements, these codes could better evaluate helium flows and impurity effects. Comparisons with helium exhaust experiments would prove enlightening. Methods to control helium flows by interactions with waves and MHD activity appear promising. Such activities are under consideration both for U.S. tokamaks and in collaborations on foreign tokamaks. PLASMA HEATING AND NON-INDUCTIVE CURRENT DRIVE Neutral-Beam Heating and Current Drive Introduction and Background Neutral-beam injection has been the principal method of heating the past several generations of tokamak plasmas and has also found utility in driving toroidal plasma currents. A neutral-beam injector consists of a high-current ion source, with multiaperture grids that electrostatically accelerate ions into a conductance-limiting duct, where a portion of the ions charge-exchange with gas to become fast neutrals. The residual ions are swept out of the beam by a deflection magnet, leaving the high-energy neutrals to pass through a duct across the tokamak's fringing magnetic fields into the plasma. Once inside the plasma, the beam neutrals are ionized, and these high-energy ions are captured by the magnetic field. As they circulate many times around the plasma, they collide with the plasma electrons and ions, transferring energy to them until the beam ions are thermalized. If the neutral beams are injected predominantly in one direction tangential to the plasma's major radius, they can drive net plasma current, reducing the need for inductive current drive after the plasma startup phase.

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Plasma science is the study of ionized states of matter. This book discusses the field's potential contributions to society and recommends actions that would optimize those contributions. It includes an assessment of the field's scientific and technological status as well as a discussion of broad themes such as fundamental plasma experiments, theoretical and computational plasma research, and plasma science education.

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