The 58th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics (APS-DPP) is underway and I made it into my first press release! The conference sets up a Virtual Pressroom to distribute press releases about some of the really cool results that will be presented during the conference. For example, you can read […]
New Plasma Pressure Record Set by Alcator C-Mod
Exciting news came from the area of nuclear fusion energy this past week as the team from the Alcator C-Mod tokamak announced their new world record for plasma pressure. Before getting to that, please note that you can interact with the C-Mod Team during their Ask Me Anything session hosted by Reddit on Thursday, October […]
25 Years of Undergraduate Research at General Atomics
General Atomics (GA) just completed its 25th year of participation in undergraduate summer research according to a press release from General Atomics that was picked up by Engineering.com. The specific programs have changed over the years, with the present program being the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) that sees undergraduates spend ten summer weeks working on research […]
Control of Power, Torque, and Instability Drive using In-shot Variable Neutral Beam Energy in Tokamaks
The paper posted below resulted from just under three years of work at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility. The big result is that we were able to engineer a big change to the 20+ MW neutral beam system such that the beams can change their voltage during plasma shots. Lots of tokamaks use neutral beams […]
Does the U.S. have a Flagship Tokamak Facility?
Summary Haiku Tokamak goes down Flagship facility, too Feelings hurt out West Magnetic fusion has grabbed quite a few headlines in the past week as news about the failure of the NSTX-U tokamak spreads through the media. One thing that caught my eye is that multiple stories, all written by different authors, all describe the NSTX-U as […]
SULI Student Highlighted by DOE
I serve as a mentor in the undergraduate research program at DIII-D and one of my students from 2015 was shown as a highlight by the Department of Energy (DOE)! The highlight is from a DOE presentation dated February 19, 2016, but I only recently found it. The presentation is an overview of the multiple […]