Richard Buttery is Director of DIII-D National Fusion Facility, an Office of Science user facility and the largest magnetic confinement fusion device in the U.S. He graduated from the University of Manchester (UK) in 1994 with a PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics. He joined the UK’s national plasma physics lab, UKAEA, as a scientist researching plasma stability, through simulation and experiments. He led the UK stability program, as well as teams on the Joint European Torus and the MAST Upgrade, and undertook collaborative work in Europe and the United States.
In 2009 he came to United States to join the DIII-D program, becoming Experimental Science Director in 2012. He has served on the US National Tokamak Working Group, ReNeW, a FESAC panel, the USBPO Council, and the APS-DPP Executive Committee. He helped outreach between plasma physics disciplines by initiating a program on DIII-D with the discovery plasma science community on frontier foundational plasma science. He led development of a Compact Advanced Tokamak (‘CAT’) concept for a fusion pilot plant, now published in Nuclear Fusion journal. He has supervised and mentored several postdoctoral fellows and scientific staff, and has over 100 scientific papers with talks given at most major meetings in the fusion field. He has a diploma in management from UCSD and is a Fellow of both the UK Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society.
TITLE: DIII-D Results and Plans on the Path to Fusion Energy
The DIII-D tokamak is a highly flexible national research facility in the United States which seeks to discover the solutions and the path to fusion energy. It is the largest magnetic confinement fusion research facility in the U.S., drawing in a wide variety of researchers from across the country and internationally, to work on multiple challenges from the core to the edge of the plasma. The facility is also highly equipped with many measurement and perturbative systems, so that it can study the behavior of phenomena encountered, and help develop projectable understanding of fusion plasma solutions. Recently the facility has commenced a series of upgrades to help it close out critical research questions to resolve a viable concept for a compact fusion ‘pilot’ plant. This includes increases in heating and current drive technology to mimic the conditions and physics regimes of a fusion reactor, and new flexibilities in power handling zones, termed ‘divertors’ to dissipate the hot plasma exhaust. This is already demonstrating exciting discoveries, such as new more efficient and reactor-compatible heating and current drive tools, ways to reach higher performance more stably and safely control or quench the fusion plasma, and insights power handling and structural designs to contain the hot plasma exhaust. In this talk I will outline some of the recent exciting progress at the facility, how research provides key insights into understanding to enable us to create validated models of behavior, and the needs, future directions and plans for the facility to meet the challenge of the fusion era.