The U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Steve Cowley, PPPL’s director, were featured on the July 23 “CBS Saturday Morning.”
PPPL researchers have found a way to build powerful magnets smaller than before, aiding the design and construction of machines that could help the world harness the power of the sun to create electricity without producing greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.
PPPL researchers have found that updating a mathematical model to include a physical property known as resistivity could lead to the improved design of doughnut-shaped fusion facilities known as tokamaks.
The latest research news in Climate Science on Newswise.
New finding could solve a paradox in spherical tokamak fusion experiments.
Story reveals a potentially critical issue for stellarator designers to avoid.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced awards for 18 projects with private industry to enhance collaboration with DOE national laboratories and U.S. universities to overcome challenges in fusion energy development.
Magnetic reconnections in laser-produced plasmas have been studied to understand the microscopic electron dynamics, which is applicable to space and astrophysical phenomena.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that 18 million node-hours have been awarded to 45 scientific projects under the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) program. The projects, with applications ranging from advanced energy systems to climate change to cancer research, will use DOE supercomputers to uncover unique insights about scientific problems that would otherwise be impossible to solve using experimental approaches.
Luis Chacon of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Applied Mathematics and Plasma Physics group is the winner of the prestigious Ernest Orlando Lawrence award for 2021.
PPPL scientists have uncovered critical new details about fusion facilities that use lasers to compress the fuel that produces fusion energy. The new data could help lead to the improved design of future laser facilities that harness the fusion process that drives the sun and stars.
Major overhaul of a collaborative department aims to enhance PPPL’s role as the U.S. national laboratory devoted to the science of fusion energy.
Nuclear fusion reactions in stars consume carbon-12 to produce oxygen-16, and the resulting ratio of carbon to oxygen shapes a star’s evolution. Physicists have not been able to measure this ratio with precision using existing experimental methods. A new method shines gamma beams on an oxygen-16 target and captures images of the outgoing reaction products to obtain higher-quality data on this reaction.
Fusion reactors face a challenge called “core-edge integration,” which involves maintaining a plasma that is hot at the core but not too hot to damage reactor walls. New research finds that a previously identified operating regime called Super H-mode can leverage the use of impurities such as nitrogen to address this challenge. The research also indicates that Super-H mode can be scaled up to future fusion plants.
The nuclei that smash together to produce fusion energy in a reactor originate from ionized neutral particles. The edges of fusion devices have large numbers of neutrals available to gain or lose electrons to become ions. These neutrals influence several important features of the plasma, including the rate at which the plasma fuels a reactor. A new pinhole camera system called Lyman-alpha Measurement Apparatus (LLAMA) on the DIII-D tokamak helped researchers better understand these neutrals.
Harnessing the power that makes the sun and stars shine could be made easier by powerful magnets with straighter shapes than have been made before. Researchers linked to the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have found a way to create such magnets for fusion facilities known as stellarators.
The National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U) at PPPL could serve as the model for a fusion energy pilot plant.
One of the challenges of fusion tokamaks is how to keep the core of a plasma hot enough that fusion can occur while preventing the tokamak walls from melting from that heat. This problem is even more difficult if instabilities at the plasma edge release energy in short bursts instead of a steady flow. Experiments on the DIII-D tokamak have demonstrated that enhancing energy flow in the plasma edge due to turbulent fluctuations can bleed energy smoothly out of the plasma, leading to improved future fusion plant efficiency.
One current and two former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists have been inducted into the Laboratory’s Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame (EHF).
Amelia Chambliss, a recent Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship student at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, discussed the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and public outreach at the White House fusion energy summit.
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