National Compact Stellarator Experiment

The National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) was a magnetic fusion energy experiment based on the stellarator design being constructed at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). NCSX was one of a number of new stellarator designs from the 1990s that arose after studies illustrated new geometries that offered better performance than the simpler machines of the 1950s and 1960s. Compared to the more common tokamak, these were much more difficult to design and build, but produced far more stable plasma, the main problem with successful fusion. The National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) was a magnetic fusion energy experiment based on the stellarator design being constructed at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). NCSX was one of a number of new stellarator designs from the 1990s that arose after studies illustrated new geometries that offered better performance than the simpler machines of the 1950s and 1960s. Compared to the more common tokamak, these were much more difficult to design and build, but produced far more stable plasma, the main problem with successful fusion. However, the design proved to be too difficult to build, repeatedly running over its budget and timelines. The project was eventually cancelled on 22 May 2008, having spent over $70 M. Stellarators are one of the first fusion power concepts, originally designed by Princeton astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer in 1952 while riding the chairlifts at Aspen. Spitzer, considering the motion of plasmas in the stars, realized that any simple arrangements of magnets would not confine a plasma inside a machine - the plasma would drift across the fields and eventually strike the vessel. His solution was very simple; by bending the machine through a 180 degree twist, forming a figure-eight instead of a donut, the plasma would alternately find itself on the inside or outside of the vessel, drifting in opposite directions. The cancellation of net drift would not be perfect, but on paper it appeared that the delay in drift rates was more than enough to allow the plasma to reach fusion conditions. In practice this proved not to be. A problem seen in all fusion reactor designs of the era was that the plasma ions were drifting much faster than classical theory predicted, hundreds to thousands of times faster. Designs that suggested stability on the order of seconds turned into machines that were stable for microseconds at best. By the mid-1960s the entire fusion energy field appeared stalled. It was only the 1968 introduction of the tokamak design that rescued the field; Soviet machines were performing at least an order of magnitude better than western designs, although still far short of practical values. The improvement was so dramatic that work on other designs largely ended as teams around the world began to study the tokamak approach. This included the latest stellarator designs; the Model C had only recently started working, and was rapidly converted into the Symmetric Tokamak.