PRESENT STATE OF RESEARCH IN CONTROLLED THERMONUCLEAR REACTIONS

Abstract

Although more than 250 papers were presented at the conference, showing the broad scope of the current studies in the field of fusicn, only a relatively minor advance has been achieved in the attack against the barriers which prevent the creation of very high plasma temperatures. There are several instability mechanisms which limit the duration of the high temperatures to a few hundreds of microseconds. Even the preparation of very pure H and D represents a difficult task in view of the interaction of the plasma with the walls of the containment vessel. In injecting a plasma jet into a magnetic trap, problems arise concerning the creation of a more-or-less uniform velocity distribution and the removal of the neutral gas. Creation of very high temperatures involved study of pulsed linear discharges, the fast linear pinches which were already discussed to some extent at the 1958 Geneva Conference. More recently, the theta pinch was studied to a great extent, as indicated by the 20 papers devoted to it. Ouasi- stationary or slow-discharge experiments were represented by papers on the Zeta, Aipha, and Sceptre machines, and the mirror machines by Ogra and DCX. The ion- msgnetron of the USSR Academy of Sciencesmore » also exhibits instabilities which limit the duration of confinement to about 100 microseconds. The magnetic trap with dynamic field is represented by the Livermore machine. The stellarator is considered to be the most promising mirror machine.« less