Fifty Years of Magnetic Fusion Research (1958–2008): Brief Historical Overview and Discussion of Future Trends

Abstract

Fifty years ago, the secrecy surrounding magnetically controlled thermonuclear fusion had been lifted allowing researchers to freely share technical results and discuss the challenges of harnessing fusion power. There were only four magnetic confinement fusion concepts pursued internationally: tokamak, stellarator, pinch, and mirror. Since the early 1970s, numerous fusion designs have been developed for the four original and three new approaches: spherical torus, field-reversed configuration, and spheromak. At present, the tokamak is regarded worldwide as the most viable candidate to demonstrate fusion energy generation. Numerous power plant studies (>50), extensive R&D programs, more than 100 operating experiments, and an impressive international collaboration led to the current wealth of fusion information and understanding. As a result, fusion promises to be a major part of the energy mix in the 21 st century. The fusion roadmaps developed to date take different approaches, depending on the anticipated power plant concept and the degree of extrapolation beyond ITER. Several Demos with differing approaches will be built in the US, EU, Japan, China, Russia, Korea, India, and other countries to cover the wide range of near-term and advanced fusion systems.

Progress in the Conceptual Design of the Helical Fusion Reactor FFHR-d1

“…Conceptual design studies of the helical fusion reactor FFHR-d1 have been progressing at National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) [1][2][3]. The FFHR design has been continued since its start in 1998 [4] as the world's longest fusion reactor design [5] on the basis of the fruitful experimental results obtained in the Large Helical Device (LHD) [6,7]. The LHD has started the deuterium experiment in 2017 [8] and confinement improvement is being examined.…”

Economically optimized design point of high-field stellarator power-plant

“…β was varied between 2% and 8% to represent the variety of stellarator configurations [3,33,107,108]. β has a major impact on the minimum COE design points, with increasing β decreasing the minimum COE.…”

Feasibility Study of Low Mass and Low Energy Consumption Drilling Devices for Future Space (Mining Surveying) Missions

“…This project is important for the development of fusion power, but it cannot be a determinant for commercial projects. In many places around the world, research on thermonuclear fusion is carried out, as described in the works [14][15][16][17][18][19]. Particularly noteworthy is the work [16] from 2010, which summarizes over 50 years of work on the development of controlled thermonuclear fusion.…”

“…Since the publication of article [16], the world has made great progress in hightemperature superconductor technology (necessary for plasma stabilization) and in the work on controlled thermonuclear fusion. Some of these works have been described in publications [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31].…”