Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Agency reference document, dated 1 November 2010, is one of a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2010 under the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It covers fusion plasma physics, confinement methods, and propulsion concepts that use aneutronic fuels such as hydrogen and boron-11. It concludes that such thrusters may soon replace satellite ion thrusters. It also finds that they will not be practical beyond the solar system without breakthrough propulsion physics.
UNCLASSIFIED/ /l"e" Cl"l"!e1,it tl!!L CHE I Chapter 5: Recent Developments U.S. DOE PROGRAMS The current U.S. Department of Energy fusion program is administered by the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (http://www.science.doe.gov/ofes/). The FY2010 budget was $421 million, with over half devoted to tokamak plasma physics and experimental facilities at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, MIT, and General Atomics. The Advanced Concepts and High-Energy-Density Laboratory Plasma Physics (HEDLPP) programs, which support plasma confinement theory and experiments for innovative fusion reactor concepts and fusion propulsion, are funded at ~$20 million. The HEDLPP program covers the following areas: • Radiative hydrodynamics. • Laser-plasma and beam-plasma interaction. • Fusion burn. • Materials under extreme conditions. • Dense plasmas in ultrahigh fields. • Laboratory astrophysics. Technology development funding is directed toward tokomak-related reactors with $135 million contributed to ITER. The National Ignition Test Facility is funded by DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration and is dedicated for nuclear weapons simulation. The NNSA-funded research also includes Magneto Target Fusion experiments at Sandia and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is a joint undertaking of the European Union, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States. The goal is to demonstrate deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion ignition in a minimum-sized tokomak confined plasma. The initial plans were to operate ITER as early as 2002 some 10 years after the planned TFTR and JET experimental results shown in Figure 17. However, delays in TFTR and JET test results, which augmented the size of the ITER plasma to 6 meters in major radius and 6 meters in height, had pushed the ITER operation out to 2020 at a cost of $20 billion. It has since been downscaled in operating requirements due to the cost and problems associated with tritium fuel and containment with a 2025 operating date and cost of $25B. The operating time of an ignition burn will be limited to minutes. These constraints have been imposed due to the excessive costs for the 200 MW power plant needed to supply the energy to ignite the tokomak plasma as well as the 36 kg of tritium needed for its initial fueling. In order to compensate for this a Demonstration Power reactor is planned to follow 5 yrs later at a substantially higher cost. 21 UNCLASSIFIED/ ,"P81l 81"1"1@111it tl!II!! 8Hl!V
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 36 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.