Session aMoaR - Review of TFTR.
INVITED session, Monday morning, November 17
Allegheny Ballroom, Doubletree
The TFTR experiments on high temperature plasmas spanned over two decades from conception to completion. These experiments culminated in the production and study, over a period of more than three years, of D-T plasmas containing substantial populations of energetic fusion alpha particles. During the design of TFTR, the key issues were MHD equilibrium and stability, plasma energy transport, impurity effects and plasma heating. These presented so many challenges that the physics of energetic particles and ignition were given less attention during this phase. Furthermore diagnostics to study the energetic particles in detail were primitive at that time. The worldwide tokamak program, including the contributions from TFTR, made substantial progress during the past two decades in addressing the fundamental issues affecting the performance of high temperature plasmas. This progress resulted from the construction of new tokamaks and the upgrading of existing facilities which enabled the routine production of well confined, high-temperature plasmas. Heating techniques in their infancy at the start of TFTR became extremely effective and reliable. In parallel, sophisticated diagnostic techniques were developed to study both the reacting plasma and the resulting energetic fusion products, while theory and computational techniques evolved both to interpret the experimental results and to predict the outcome of future experiments. In this talk, key results from TFTR will be presented in relationship to our initial understanding and opportunities for improving our understanding and predictive capability will be discussed.