If the National Compact Stellarator Experiment planned for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is successful, stellarators could become prime contenders in the snails’ race to achieve fusion energy. The $70 million NCSX is allotted $12 million out of the Bush budget’s $257 million for fusion research in fiscal year 2003. Assuming the money comes through, construction would begin in 2004, and the stellarator would be due to come online in 2007.
Like tokamaks, their currently more advanced cousins, stellarators use magnetic fields to confine plasma in a torus for fusion reactions. But unlike tokamaks, in which the field varies in only two dimensions, in stellarators the field is fully three-dimensional, with the advantage of sustainability (the plasma doesn’t suddenly collapse, or disrupt) and the disadvantage of poor plasma confinement (the plasma loses particles and energy). New stellarators beat the confinement problem by creating a quasi-symmetric field—trading fiendishly complex magnetic fields...
