FPN02-65

New US Planning Effort Starts

September 24, 2002

Following up on a request from US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science director Ray Orbach (FPN02-58) DOE's Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC) has established a panel "to develop a plan with the end goal of the start of operation of a demonstration power plant in approximately 35 years." The panel will be chaired by Rob Goldston, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The panel plans to make a preliminary report to the full FESAC at its next meeting November 25-26 in Gaithersburg, MD. A final report is due in March. The panel plans meetings October 3-4 at Princeton, October 28-31 in the San Francisco Bay area and November 15-17 in Orlando, Florida.

The charge letter from Orbach to FESAC chairman Richard Hazeltine (posted at http://fire.pppl.gov) says that the preliminary plan should "both provide a general plan to achieve the aforementioned goal and identify those significant issues that deserve immediate attention." The charge says that the more detailed plan, "upon which budgeting exercises can be based," would be "most useful" if it:

Identifies all important technical and scientific issues, the tasks that would lead to their resolution, and the sequence in which these tasks should be accomplished in order to reach the program goal most effectively;
Identifies specifically all of the major facilities needed to support the tasks, and provides the mission and approximate cost of each facility;
Provides a set of general performance measures by which the progress toward the accomplishment of the tasks and/or the mission of related facilities can be measured;
Identifies key decision points where choices can be made among the various concepts and technologies being pursued; and
To the extent possible, an estimate of the overall cost of such a plan, and optimum funding scenario(s).

As of this date, the following persons have been appointed to the panel by FESAC chair Hazeltine:

M. Abdou, UCLA
C. Baker, UCSD
M. Campbell, General Atomics
V. Chan, General Atomics
S. Dean, Fusion Power Associates
R. Goldston, PPPL, chair
A. Hubbard, MIT
R. Iotti, CH2M Hill
T. Jarboe, U. Washington
J. Lindl, LLNL
G. Logan, LBNL
K. McCarthy, INEEL
F. Najmabadi, UCSD
C. Olson, Sandia National Laboratories
S. Prager, U. Wisconsin
N. Sautoff, PPPL
J. Sethian, US Naval Research Laboratory
J. Sheffield, ORNL
S. Zinkle, ORNL

Messages may be sent to the group as a whole at: devpath@pppl.gov