National Compact Stellarator Experiment
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The National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) is a plasma confinement experiment being conducted at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. First plasma is scheduled to take place in July 2009. It is a variation of the stellarator concept, with a much lower aspect ratio than a typical stellerator. NCSX is one of the first fusion experiments to use massively parallel computing to find the optimal shape for the reactor vessel; one of the advantages of correctly-designed stellerators is that the confined plasma is passively stable when a steady magnetic field is applied, whereas tokamaks require an array of active control strategies to stabilise the plasma, even under a constant magnetic field. Up to 12MW of auxiliary heating power will be available to the NCSX chamber, consisting of 6MW from tangential neutral-beam injection, and 6MW from radio-frequency (RF) heating. Up to 3MW of electron cyclotron heating may also be available in future iterations of the design.
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