University of Washington (UW)

The University of Washington will advance the technical viability of a novel method, Imposed-Dynamo Current Drive (IDCD), for sustaining and heating spheromak plasmas as the basis of compact, low-cost fusion power plants. A traditional tokamak fusion reactor has a toroidal confinement area, similar shape to a donut, with a hole in the middle. The spheromak reduces the size of the hole as much as possible, resulting in a spherical plasma shape similar to a cored apple. IDCD can efficiently couple large amounts of power to the plasma at much lower costs relative to other methods of higher-frequency plasma heating. The proposed R&D aims to achieve spheromak ion and electron temperatures > 100 eV during sustainment on an existing experimental prototype. Other R&D activities include computational tasks to support both the scientific and engineering design of next-step prototypes with higher fusion performance. This project will increase the technological readiness level of this lower-cost fusion concept to encourage further development toward commercial fusion energy with both public and private support.