Report of panel 4: Priorities in the intermediate confinement experiments

Abstract

In a letter dated June 22, 1992, Dr. Will Happer, Director of the Office of Energy Research, requested that the FEAC address the priorities within the MFE program under several budget scenarios. As part of the preparation for answering this charge, Panel 4 was created by the FEAC chairman, Professor Robert Conn. He asked the Panel to assemble background information on three mid-sized toroidal facilities, the Alcator C-Mod and PBX-M tokamaks at the Massachusetts Institute Technology and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, respectively, and the ATF stellarator at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and to provide draft conclusions to the FEAC on the question of priorities. The Panel was later asked to provide similar background information on the proposed DIII-D Upgrade, in view of the fact that the Upgrade objectives encompassed many of those of the three smaller facilities. This report contains summaries of the four machines' capabilities and their places in the world programs. These summaries were prepared with the cooperation of the respective research groups. Draft positions of the Panel on priorities were communicated directly to FEAC as part of its deliberations, the conclusions of which were available at the September 1992 FEAC Meeting. Because the priority recommendationsmore » of the FEAC supersede those of Panel 4, the issue of priorities have not been revisited by the Panel, as had originally been planned.« less