Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Fusion energy is extracted from the nuclear reaction between deuterium and tritium (D-T). Deuterium can be extracted from sea water (the concentration of deuterium is about 115 parts per million in sea water) and tritium can be bred from lithium which is abundant on earth. After decades long efforts by fusion scientists and engineers, a self-sustained experimental fusion reactor with net energy gain will soon be demonstrated in ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) currently built in Chadarache, France. ITER in an international collaborative project participated in by China, European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and USA. ITER is a tokamak fusion reactor device using magnetic fields to confine high temperature (100 millions of degrees) and high density fuels in the plasma state. Fusion energy is attractive because of its fuel abundance, its safety without a danger of melting-down, and its low carbon footprints. For steady state operation of ITER and future commercial reactors, many key issues have to be addresses. STOR-M in the Plasma Physics Laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan is currently the only tokamak device for fusion research in Canada. STOR-M is equipped with a compact torus injector devoted to development of tokamak fuelling technology. In the proposed research project, research will be carried out to study the intrinsic instabilities in the tokamak plasma and to control the plasma flow by externally applied resonance magnetic perturbations (RMP) and by compact torus (CT) injection. Compact torus (CT) is a fully ionized high density plasmoid confined by the magnetic field produced by itself. Once detached from the formation electrodes, CT can be accelerated to a large velocity (200 to 400 km/sec) which allows penetration into a strong magnetic field. The attractiveness of CT fuelling technology will be further enhanced if tangential CT injection will also offer a means to control plasma rotation in a tokamak since rotation is the key to avoid locked mode causing disruptions in tokamak.