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Deep geologic repository progress—2025 Update
Editor's note: This article has was originally published in November 2023. It has been updated with new information as of June 2025.
Outside my office, there is a display case filled with rock samples from all over the world. It contains a disk of translucent, orange salt from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; a core of white-and-bronze gneiss from the site of the future deep geologic repository in Eurajoki, Finland; several angular chunks of fine-grained, gray claystone from the underground research laboratory at Bure, France; and a piece of coarse-grained granite from the underground research tunnel in Daejeon, South Korea.
P.G. Papanikolaou, C.K. Choi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1317-1321
Result of Large Experiment and Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29524
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The potential for the field-reversed configuration (FRC) as a fusion reactor concept, in particular as a candidate for an alternate concept device, depends on its confinement characteristics. The advantages of an FRC plasma are that it is easily produced and has low impurity concentrations. Currently, the electron and heat loss rates are higher than those predicted by Coulomb collisions. Analyses using the local approximation predict that LHD waves should exist near the separatrix, but experiments have failed to detect them. This local approximation may not be valid in two regions: near the field null, where ion orbits may be large and near the separatrix, where the equilibrium magnetic field and the plasma density can change appreciably. In this papaer we develop a method to analyze the stability of a 1-D FRC that takes the sharp gradients near the separatrix and the effect of the field null into account. This finite element code seeks a solution to the linearized Maxwell-Vlasov equations in the form of eigenvalues to a dispersion matrix. The dispersion matrix contains all the information pertaining to the stability of the plasma.