Stellarator approach to fusion plasma confinement

The stellarator is a toroidal fusion plasma confinement device with nested magnetic flux surfaces. The required twist of the field lines is produced by external helical coils rather than by plasma current, as in a tokamak. Stellarator devices are attractive fusion reactor candidates precisely because they offer the prospect of steady-state operation without plasma current. In the last few years the excellent results achieved with currentless stellarator plasmas of modest minor radius (10 to 20 cm) at Kyoto University (Japan) and the Max Planck Institute (West Germany) have made the stellarator second only to the tokamak in its progress toward fusion breakeven, with temperatures T/sub e/, T/sub i/ approx. 1 KeV, Lawson products n tau approx. 2 to 5 x 1012 cm-3.s, and volume-averaged beta values approx. = 2%. The Advanced Toroidal Facility (ATF), now under construction at Oak Ridge Natioal Laboratory (ORNL) and scheduled to operate in 1986, represents a significant advance in stellarator research, with a plasma major radius of 2.1 m, an average minor radius of 0.3 m, and a magnetic field of 2 T for 5 s or 1 T at steady state. ATF replaces the Impurity Study Experiment (ISX-B) tokamak at ORNL and will use the ISX-B heating and diagnostic system