Stellarator Research Opportunities

This poster is the product of a stellarator community workshop, organized by the National Stellarator Coordinating Committee and referred to as Stellcon, that was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in February 2016. The workshop was attended by 40 scientists from 12 different institutions including national labs, universities and private industry, as well as a representative from the Department of Energy. This poster describes areas of community-wide consensus that were developed as a result of the discussions held at that workshop. Areas where further study would be helpful to generate a consensus path forward for the US stellarator program are also discussed. The program outlined in this document is directly responsive to many of the strategic priorities of FES as articulated in “Fusion Energy Sciences: A Ten-Year Perspective (2015-2025)”. The natural disruption immunity of the stellarator directly addresses “Elimination of transient events that can be deleterious to toroidal fusion plasma confinement devices” and “Strengthening our partnerships with international research facilities,” is being significantly advanced on the W7-X stellarator in Germany.