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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Bipartisan commission report urges national fusion strategy
In the report Fusion Forward: Powering America’s Future issued earlier this month by the Special Competitive Studies Project’s (SCSP) Commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy, it warns that the United States is on the verge of losing the fusion power race to China.
Noting that China has invested at least $6.5 billion in its fusion enterprise since 2023, almost three times the funding received by the U.S. Department of Energy’s fusion program over the same period, the commission report urges the U.S. government to prioritize the rapid commercialization of fusion energy to secure U.S. national security and restore American energy leadership.
SCSP is a nonpartisan, nonprofit initiative making recommendations to strengthen America’s long-term competitiveness in emerging technologies. Launched in fall 2024, the 13-member commission is led by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) and Jim Risch (R., Idaho), along with SCSP president and commission co-chair Ylli Bajraktari.
T. Akiyama, K. Kawahata, K. Tanaka, T. Tokuzawa, Y. Ito, S. Okajima, K. Nakayama, C. A. Michael, L. N. Vyacheslavov, A. Sanin, S. Tsuji-Iio, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 352-363
Chapter 8. Diagnostics | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-8
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes the interferometer systems on the Large Helical Device (LHD). LHD is equipped with five interferometer systems, each of which has a different operational purpose and measurable electron density range. A single-channel millimeter-wave interferometer is mainly used for low-density plasmas along a horizontal line of sight on the equatorial plane. Wavelengths of 1 and 2 mm are used for vibration compensation based on two-color interferometry, which has been used since the first operation of LHD. A 13-channel CH3OH laser interferometer (wavelength of 119 m) covers almost the whole poloidal cross sections of LHD plasmas with a chord separation of 90 mm. It routinely provides temporal behavior and profiles of the electron density. The laser has been developed as a collaboration between the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) and Chubu University. An 80-channel CO2 laser interferometer (10.6 m) is employed for high-density plasmas such as superdense core plasmas. It adopts an imaging technique with three slablike beams and array detectors to measure the density profile precisely. A phase contrast imaging interferometer, which measures density fluctuations, is combined with the CO2 laser interferometer. Since LHD has strong magnetic shear, a distribution of the density fluctuations is evaluated by using shear technique. A conventional millimeter-wave (4 mm) interferometer is also installed at a divertor region to measure dynamic density responses in a divertor leg. The phase counter used on these interferometers was originally developed at NIFS. The phase resolution of a typical phase counter is 1/100 fringe with a temporal response of 10 s.