Recent Fusion Research in the National Institute for Fusion Science

Abstract

The National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), which was established in 1989, promotes academic approaches toward the exploration of fusion science for steady-state helical reactor and realizes the establishment of a comprehensive understanding of toroidal plasmas as an inter-university research organization and a key center of worldwide fusion research. The Large Helical Device (LHD) Project, the Numerical Simulation Science Project, and the Fusion Engineering Project are organized for early realization of net current free fusion reactor, and their recent activities are described in this paper. The LHD has been producing high-performance plasmas comparable to those of large tokamaks, and several new findings with regard to plasma physics have been obtained. The numerical simulation science project contributes understanding and systemization of the physical mechanisms of plasma confinement in fusion plasmas and explores complexity science of a plasma for realization of the numerical test reactor. In the fusion engineering project, the design of the helical fusion reactor has progressed based on the development of superconducting coils, the blanket, fusion materials and tritium handling.

Statistical induction of a thermal transport model based on the transport analyses database

“…The variables in the top five rows of table 1 are related to plasma parameters, which are calculated from measured (and then fitted) profiles. Those in the bottom four rows are related to the properties of magnetic configurations, and they are evaluated in modules for equilibrium in TASK3D-a (more precisely, VMEC [11] and GIOTA [12], as shown in figure 1 of [9]). As a basis for grasping the fundamental feature of these variables, a scatter plot matrix (after transferring the variables to a logarithmic scale for executing log-linear regression analyses) is shown in figure 3.…”

Long-Term Monitoring of Tritium Concentration in Environmental Water Samples Collected at Tono Area, Japan

“…The Large Helical Device (LHD), constructed by the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) at Toki, Gifu Prefecture, is a heliotron-type plasma experiment device designed to investigate the extrapolatable plasma to the fusion reactor [4][5][6], and was started operation in 1998.…”