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78-644: The original TMX was designed and built in a short period between its conception at a major physics meeting in Germany in October 1976, its design in January 1977, and its completion in October 1978. Over the next year, it validated the tandem mirror approach. Plans began to build a much larger machine based on the same principles, the Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF). MFTF was initially just

156-537: A New York Times article warned that the word "glut" was misleading, and that in reality, while temporary surpluses had brought down prices somewhat, prices were still well above pre-energy crisis levels. This sentiment was echoed in November 1981, when the CEO of Exxon also characterized the glut as a temporary surplus, and that the word "glut" was an example of "our American penchant for exaggerated language". He wrote that

234-424: A commercially useful system would likely need to have 10 or more. Tokamaks did not appear to have any such limit. In order to be relevant after the next series of designs, LLNL would have to come up with a way to greatly improve Q . This sparked off considerable discussion on the topic of "Q enhancement". The solution was eventually provided by T. Kenneth Fowler at LLNL later in 1976; he and David Baldwin developed

312-612: A few countries. The "Embargo" was never effective from Saudi Arabia towards the US, as reported by James E. Akins in interview at 24:10 in the documentary "la face cachée du pétrole part 2". Akins, who audited US capacity for Nixon after US peak, was US ambassador in Saudi Arabia at that time. Lawrence Rocks and Richard Runyon captured the unfolding of these events at the time in The Energy Crisis book. In October 1973,

390-452: A glut on the world market, causing a six-year-long decline in oil prices culminating with a 46 percent price drop in 1986. The U.S. reported a negative economic growth during the period concerning the 1970s and it remained weak till the 1980s as the post world war II economic boom drew to a close. But it was a different type of recession as it was a scenario of stagflation which is a rare economic consequence. Other causes that contributed to

468-497: A plasma, they tend to leak out of a mirror machine more rapidly than the fuel ions. Over time, this causes the mass of the fuel left inside the mirror to increasingly consist of ions. This, in turn, creates a net positive charge, providing additional forces that help push the fuel out of the mirror, increasing the rate of leakage. It was this leakage that limited the Q of the machine; counteracting it required extremely powerful magnets that demanded large amounts of power and thus reduced

546-415: A prototype power plant. Having secured a massive budget increase, and desiring a second design in case the tokamak didn't pan out, a study of the alternative concepts suggested the best developed was the mirror. The original MFTF was essentially a very large yin-yang mirror, expected around 1982. Hirsch's associate, Stephen O. Dean , asked for ideas that would improve the economics of the mirror. This led to

624-540: A scaled-up version of TMX, but when the design was studied it was seen that it would not reach its desired performance. Some system was needed that would boost the internal temperature of the fuel. A solution was found in the form of " thermal barriers " which would trap high-energy electrons and allow the fuel to be increased in energy without increasing leakage. MFTF was modified to add barriers and became MFTF-B. While construction on MFTF-B began, thermal barriers were added to TMX to become TMX-U in 1982. While TMX-U validated

702-437: A worldwide center for mirror research. In a famous talk in 1954, Edward Teller expressed his belief that machines like the mirror had an inherent instability, today known as the interchange instability , which would make them incapable of trapping a plasma for anywhere near the required time scales. At the time, in the infancy of the program, none of the existing machines could confine a plasma long enough to see whether this

780-531: Is often questioned. The targeted countries responded with a wide variety of new, and mostly permanent, initiatives to contain their further dependency. The 1973 "oil price shock", along with the 1973–1974 stock market crash , have been regarded as the first event since the Great Depression to have a persistent economic effect. A crisis emerged in the United States in 1979 during the wake of

858-559: The Arab world and some other predominantly Muslim countries. The animosity between the Arabs and the Israelis became a global issue during the 1970s. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, with the supplying of Israel by its Western allies while some Arab states received Soviet supplies, made this one of the most internationally threatening confrontations of the period. The large oil discoveries in

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936-506: The Bretton Woods Accord and taking the U.S. off the established Gold Exchange Standard in 1971. The change resulted in instability in world currencies and depreciation of the value of the U.S. dollar , as well as other currencies. The revenues of OPEC also took a hit since they priced oil in dollars. Finally OPEC started pricing oil against gold to combat the situation. But OPEC still struggled to maintain stability in

1014-692: The Iranian Revolution . Amid massive protests, the Shah of Iran , Mohammad Reza Pahlavi , fled his country in early 1979, allowing the Ayatollah Khomeini to gain control. The protests shattered the Iranian oil sector. While the new regime resumed oil exports, it was inconsistent and at a lower volume, forcing prices to go up. Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations, under the presidency of Dr. Mana Alotaiba increased production to offset

1092-561: The Middle East gave some Muslim countries unique leverage in the world, beginning in the 1960s. The 1973 and 1979 crises, in particular, were demonstrations of the new power that these countries had found. The United States and other countries were forced to become more involved in the conflicts between these states and Israel. One of the first challenges OPEC faced in the 1970s was the United States' unilaterally pulling out of

1170-619: The National Bureau of Economic Research , the U.S. economy slid into a recession during the period of 1973-75. Inflation levels remained high even when an economic expansion took place afterwards. During this recession, the Gross Domestic Product of the United States fell 3.2%. Although the recession ended in March 1975, the unemployment rate did not peak for several months. In May 1975, the rate reached its height for

1248-688: The North Sea offshore fields of the United Kingdom and Norway, the Cantarell offshore field of Mexico, and oil sands in Canada. As a result of the 1973 crisis many nations created strategic petroleum reserves (SPRs), crude oil inventories (or stockpiles) held by the governments of particular countries or private industry, for the purpose of providing economic and national security during an energy crisis. The International Energy Agency (IEA)

1326-550: The United States , Canada , Western Europe , Australia , and New Zealand , faced substantial petroleum shortages as well as elevated prices. The two worst crises of this period were the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 energy crisis , when, respectively, the Yom Kippur War and the Iranian Revolution triggered interruptions in Middle Eastern oil exports. The crisis began to unfold as petroleum production in

1404-690: The University of Wisconsin (Phaedrus) were defunded the next year. The TMX was formally proposed by Fred Coensgen and the Livermore team on January 12, 1977 to the US Energy Research and Development Administration . The project was projected to cost 11 million dollars. The design consisted of five rings of current around the plasma. The ends uses shaped "Baseball" magnets at the end to stop plasma from escaping. This design produced magnetic forces that increase in every direction away from

1482-451: The tandem mirror concept, and a redesign as MFTF-B, with the original mirror becoming one end of a much larger machine. To test the new concept, a smaller machine that could be rapidly built was constructed, Tandem Mirror Experiment , or TMX. Construction of MFTF and TMX began in 1977 and TMX began operations in 1979. By the early 1980s, TMX was beginning to demonstrate serious problems that suggested MFTF-B would not work as predicted. This

1560-616: The theta pinch and mirrors. Hirsch's assistant, Stephen O. Dean , visited LLNL and told them that to remain in the running, they would have to produce a design that was competitive with the tokamaks in the short term. He noted that in this respect, while baseball might be the better design, in the short term the 2X had higher performance and a better chance of catching up to the tokamaks. The staff at LLNL were insulted that Washington bureaucrats were trying to tell them how to do their jobs, but Dean pointed out that Hirsch already had two of LLNL's other programs shut down, Aston and Levitron . If

1638-501: The 1960s, petroleum production in some of the world's top producers with extraction technology at the time began to peak. West Germany reached its production peak in 1966, Venezuela and the United States in 1970, and Iran in 1974. Canada 's conventional oil production peaked around this same time (though non-conventional production later helped revive Canadian production to some degree). The worldwide production per capita peaked soon afterward. Although production in other parts of

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1716-406: The 1973 and 1979 energy crises) and the energy conservation spurred by high fuel prices. The inflation adjusted real 2004 dollar value of oil fell from an average of $ 78.2 per barrel in 1981 to an average of $ 26.8 in 1986. In June 1981, The New York Times stated an "Oil glut! ... is here" and Time Magazine stated: "the world temporarily floats in a glut of oil", though the next week

1794-463: The 1980s, both the recessions of the 1970s and adjustments in local economies to become more efficient in petroleum usage, controlled demand sufficiently for petroleum prices worldwide to return to more sustainable levels. The period was not uniformly negative for all economies. Petroleum-rich countries in the Middle East benefited from increased prices and the slowing production in other areas of

1872-524: The 1980s. Ever since Israel declared independence in 1948 there was conflict between Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East , including a number of wars . The Suez Crisis , also known as the Second Arab–Israeli war, was sparked when Israel's southern port of Eilat was blocked by Egypt , which also nationalized the Suez Canal belonging to Anglo-French investors. One of the objectives of

1950-622: The Middle East, which complicated the situation. To address these developments, the Nixon Administration began parallel negotiations with both Arab oil producers to end the embargo, and with Egypt , Syria , and Israel to arrange an Israeli pull back from the Sinai and the Golan Heights after the fighting stopped. By January 18, 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had negotiated an Israeli troop withdrawal from parts of

2028-568: The Sinai. The promise of a negotiated settlement between Israel and Syria was sufficient to convince Arab oil producers to lift the embargo in March 1974. By May, Israel agreed to withdraw from the Golan Heights . Independently, the OPEC members agreed to use their leverage over the world price-setting mechanism for oil to stabilize their real incomes by raising world oil prices. This action followed several years of steep income declines after

2106-468: The United States after Richard Nixon requested $ 2.2 billion to support Israel in the war. Nevertheless, the embargo lasted only until January 1974, though the price of oil remained high afterwards. The real price of petroleum was stable in the 1970 timeframe, but there had been a sharp increase in American imports, putting a strain on American balance of trade, alongside other developed nations. During

2184-425: The United States and some other parts of the world peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s. World oil production per capita began a long-term decline after 1979. The oil crises prompted the first shift towards energy-saving (in particular, fossil fuel-saving) technologies. The major industrial centers of the world were forced to contend with escalating issues related to petroleum supply. Western countries relied on

2262-532: The beginning of 1971 (and shortages, especially for heating oil, started from there). The "embargo" as described below is the "practical name" given to the crisis. For the main Arab producers, the "embargo" allowed them to show to "the Arab street " that they were doing something for the Palestinians. In real market terms (number of barrels) the embargo was almost a non-event, and only from a few countries, towards

2340-541: The center of the mirror region. A fusion plasma shaped like a twisted bow tie is confined inside a magnetic mirror. Designing appropriate plugs was a challenge for all magnetic mirror machines. The baseball design was later replaced by the exotic yin-yang magnets of the MFTF . Problems with escaping plasma led researchers towards the Tokamak where plugs were eliminated by looping the field together. A summary of results from

2418-430: The center of the mirrors would preferentially be attracted towards these negative areas, into the center of the reactor. With this advance suggesting the mirror was in the running for both breakeven and as a practical reactor, LLNL proposed building a smaller machine than MX to test the layout. A formal proposal was presented to the newly-formed Department of Energy on 12 January 1977, and approved that month. Baseball II

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2496-410: The concept in general, the thermal barriers were not stable. MFTF-B was almost complete by this time, and funding was cancelled the day after its completion. TMX-U continued to operate until February 1987. Magnetic mirror machines were among the first serious designs for fusion reactors, along with the stellarator and z-pinch . The machine was very simple, consisting largely of a solenoid in which

2574-411: The concept now known as the "tandem mirror", in which 2XIIB-like mirrors were placed at either end of a large solenoid between them. The two mirrors would still have relatively low Q on their own, but over time the hot plasma they naturally leaked would heat the fuel in the solenoid to the point where it was undergoing fusion as well. At that point, the amount of power being released was limited only by

2652-518: The conflict. With the US actions seen as initiating the oil embargo, the long-term possibility of embargo-related high oil prices, disrupted supply and recession, created a strong rift within NATO ; both European countries and Japan sought to disassociate themselves from the US Middle East policy. Arab oil producers had also linked the end of the embargo with successful US efforts to create peace in

2730-592: The cycle of 9%. The recession also lasted from 1973 to 1975 in the United Kingdom . The GDP declined by 3.9% or 3.37% depending on the source. It took 14 quarters for the UK's GDP to recover to that at the start of recession. High oil prices in the 1970s induced investment in oil production by non-OPEC countries, particularly for reserves with a higher cost of production. These included Prudhoe Bay in Alaska,

2808-505: The decline, and the overall loss in production was about 4 percent. However, a widespread panic resulted, driving the price far higher than would be expected under normal circumstances. In 1980, following the Iraqi invasion of Iran , oil production in Iran nearly stopped, and Iraq's oil production was severely cut as well. After 1980, oil prices began a decline as other countries began to fill

2886-464: The direction of Robert L. Hirsch , began to redirect the labs away from pure research towards an effort to make a working reactor design. The tokamak presented an apparent path to that end, and Hirsch began funding several large tokamak development projects in what became known as the "tokamak stampede". He also desired to have at least one backup concept in case something turned up as tokamaks grew larger. The two most successful designs at that time were

2964-475: The earlier Baseball II device, the facility was originally a similar system in which the confinement area was located between two horseshoe-shaped "mirrors". During construction the success of the Tandem Mirror Experiment ("TMX") led to a redesign to insert a solenoid area between two such magnets, dramatically improving confinement time from a few milliseconds to over one second. Most of

3042-483: The effective temperature on the ends was higher than in the center. This produced a kinetic barrier to fuel in the center tank and could significantly lower leakage rates, thereby further improving Q . The advance was so great that it appeared the existing MFTF concept, essentially a scaled-up TMX, would serve no purpose. To test barrier the concept, in 1979 Fowler proposed taking TXM offline once its current experimental runs had ended in 1981. It would then be rebuilt with

3120-492: The end cells in the new configuration, as TMX-U. TMX-U was not expected to be available until 1983, which would introduce a lengthy delay in the MFTF project if the same idea was to be used on that design as well. In late 1979, Fowler proposed continuing the construction of MTFT-B with allowances so that the injectors could be modified if need be based on the results from TMX-U. The new director of fusion research, Ed Kinter , approved

3198-400: The fusion power would be produced in the long solenoid. The yin-yang magnets would then serve only to dam up the ends in order to maintain good plasma confinement in the solenoid. Limited to break-even energy balance, the magnetic mirror endcaps consumed power, but much less than that produced in a solenoid of sufficient length. A new version, officially MFTF-B, started construction in 1977 and

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3276-732: The invasion was the removal of President Gamal Abdel Nasser who was aligning with the Soviet Union . The Six-Day War of 1967 included an Israeli invasion of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula , which resulted in Egypt's closure of the Suez Canal for eight years . The canal was cleared in 1974 and opened again in 1975 after the 1973 Yom Kippur War , when Egypt tried to take back the Sinai. OAPEC countries cut production of oil and placed an embargo on oil exports to

3354-408: The lab could not demonstrate a practically significant improvement in performance, they might lose their mirror program as well. He found an ally in the lab's director, John Foster, Jr. , who broadly agreed with Dean's assessment of the political situation. In response, effort on Baseball II was reduced, and a larger machine known as 2XIIB was designed in place of the original 2XII. The major change

3432-486: The late 1960s, it appeared possible to build stable mirrors. However, these changes had also lowered their economic performance, to the point where they appeared unattractive as power generators. In 1968, the Soviets demonstrated their tokamak systems were outperforming all others by a factor of at least ten. The path to practical fusion appeared open, and in the US, in the mid-1970s, Robert Hirsch began plans to produce

3510-482: The magnetic mirror machines by saying: "They kept adding one set of magnets a year until it collapsed under its own weight" and in his article " The Trouble With Fusion ." Mirror Fusion Test Facility The Mirror Fusion Test Facility , or MFTF , was an experimental magnetic confinement fusion device built using the tandem magnetic mirror design. It was, by far, the largest, most powerful and most expensive mirror machine ever constructed. Due to budget cuts, it

3588-470: The main cause of the glut was declining consumption. In the United States, Europe and Japan, oil consumption had fallen 13% from 1979 to 1981, due to "in part, in reaction to the very large increases in oil prices by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and other oil exporters", continuing a trend begun during the 1973 price increases. After 1980, reduced demand and overproduction produced

3666-572: The members of Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries or the OAPEC (consisting of the Arab members of OPEC ) proclaimed an oil embargo "in response to the U.S. decision to re-supply the Israeli military" during the Yom Kippur war ; it lasted until March 1974. OAPEC declared it would limit or stop oil shipments to the United States and other countries if they supported Israel in

3744-460: The moment the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is one of the largest government-owned reserves, with a capacity of up to 713.5 million barrels (113,440,000 m ). Recently, other non-IEA countries have begun creating their own strategic petroleum reserves, with China being the second largest overall and the largest non-IEA country. Since Israel's declaration of independence in 1948 this state has found itself in nearly continual conflict with

3822-415: The net output. A number of attempts had been made to address this by injecting new fuel into the ends of the mirror using small particle accelerators . In 1979, Fowler, David Baldwin and Grant Logan suggested a new layout for these injectors that appeared to be able to produce a "thermal barrier" that should greatly reduce the leakage. The idea was to inject new fuel ions into the ends of the mirror cells so

3900-498: The original runs with TMX was published in February 1981. At this time, the facility underwent a major overhaul. A thermal barrier was added to better contain the plasma, the number of rings was increased to over ten the vacuum and diagnostic system was overhauled and extra magnets were added to plug up losses. The new machine was referred to as the "TMX-U" and it operated into the late eighties. Lawrence Lidsky famously criticized

3978-456: The plan, and MFTF became MFTF-B, for "barrier". Ultimately, this plan proved unwise. When TMX-U began operations it was clear that the improvements from the new injectors was nowhere near what was hoped of them. When these results were scaled up to the MFTF-B design, it became clear it would not be able to reach breakeven. Construction of MFTF-B, already well underway, was allowed to continue, but

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4056-513: The price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil increased 250 percent. Although all states felt the effects of the stock market crash and related national economic problems, the economic benefits of increased oil revenue in the Oil Patch states generally offset much of this. Following the 1970s, the global energy consumption per capita broke away from its previous trend of rapid growth, instead remaining relatively flat for multiple decades until

4134-426: The production shortfalls from Iran and Iraq. The 1973 and 1979 energy crisis had caused petroleum prices to peak in 1980 at over US$ 35 per barrel (US$ 129 in today's dollars). Following these events slowing industrial economies and stabilization of supply and demand caused prices to begin falling in the 1980s. The glut began in the early 1980s as a result of slowed economic activity in industrial countries (due to

4212-741: The project was cited as a case study of the hypothetical demon of Bureaucratic Chaos, which "blocks good things from happening" at the United States Department of Energy . Its fate was reminiscent of the Superconducting Super Collider and the National Compact Stellarator Experiment , both of which were also canceled. 1970s energy crisis The 1970s energy crisis occurred when the Western world , particularly

4290-477: The project was defunded and closed on 22 February 1986, the day after its construction was declared complete. TMX-U fired its last shots the same month. Dean would later comment that in their effort to catch up to tokamaks the mirror program was pushed too hard. LLNL, who had received $ 720 million since 1974 for their mirror program, shut down their mirror program and turned its attention to the inertial confinement fusion approach. Mirror programs at MIT (Tara) and

4368-428: The recent failure of negotiations with the major Western oil companies earlier in the month. For the most part, industrialized economies relied on crude oil, and OPEC was their major supplier. Because of the dramatic inflation experienced during this period, a popular economic theory has been that these price increases were to blame, as being suppressive of economic activity. However, the causality stated by this theory

4446-599: The recession included the Vietnam War , which turned out costly for the United States and the fall of the Bretton Woods system . The emergence of newly industrialized countries rose competition in the metal industry, triggering a steel crisis , where industrial core areas in North America and Europe were forced to re-structure. The 1973–1974 stock market crash made the recession evident. According to

4524-402: The region as the negotiations between them and other Western oil companies bore little to no positive results. The major oil-producing regions of the U.S.— Texas , Oklahoma , Louisiana , Colorado , Wyoming , and Alaska —benefited greatly from the price inflation of the 1970s as did the U.S. oil industry in general. Oil prices generally increased throughout the decade; between 1978 and 1980

4602-403: The resources of countries in the Middle East and other parts of the world. The crisis led to stagnant economic growth in many countries as oil prices surged. Although there were genuine concerns with supply, part of the run-up in prices resulted from the perception of a crisis. The combination of stagnant growth and price inflation during this era led to the coinage of the term stagflation . By

4680-417: The same basic concept emerged from the UK, the "tennis ball", which was quickly picked up at Livermore, Americanized to "baseball coils", and built in a series of machines known as ALICE, Baseball I and II. These machines used a single magnet which made them much easier to build, and also had the advantage of having a very large internal volume which made it easy to insert diagnostics. The downside to this design

4758-418: The size of this central tank, which required much less energy to power than the 2X mirrors at either end. Thus a much larger amount of fuel would be undergoing fusion while requiring only a small amount of additional power. The problem was that mirrors are naturally symmetrical, if the fuel could flow out one end into the tank it could just as easily flow out the other and escape entirely. To solve this problem,

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4836-472: The tandem mirror aimed to create an "ambipolar" plasma. Ideally, this allowed it to contain electrons and ions differently. Because the ions are so much more massive than the electrons they can exist with different speeds simultaneously, whereas the electrons are almost always at high speed. By trapping a volume of ions in the mirrors, electrons would be attracted to the two sides of the reactor, forming an area of negative charge. Higher-energy ions escaping

4914-470: The two designs, baseball and yin-yang, the physicists generally preferred the former as it had easier access for diagnostic systems, and that this would also have an advantage in a real reactor as it allowed easier access for maintenance. These results were emerging in the early 1970s, which coincided with the 1970s energy crisis , and a resulting massive infusion of capital by the US federal government into new forms of energy. The fusion directorate, now under

4992-497: The wires were not wound evenly but had areas at each end with more windings. When a current ran through the windings, the resulting magnetic field would pinch down at the ends, causing the electrons and ions to reflect back into the center and thereby stay confined. Richard F. Post at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) became a major proponent of the concept, and Livermore became

5070-411: The world was increasing, the peaks in these regions began to put substantial upward pressure on world oil prices. Equally as important, control of the oil supply became an increasingly important problem as countries like West Germany and the U.S. became increasingly dependent on foreign suppliers for this key resource. The 1973 oil crisis is a direct consequence of the US production peak in late 1960 and

5148-402: The world. Some other countries, such as Norway, Mexico, and Venezuela, benefited as well. In the United States, Texas and Alaska , as well as some other oil-producing areas, experienced major economic booms due to soaring oil prices even as most of the rest of the nation struggled with the stagnant economy. Many of these economic gains, however, came to a halt as prices stabilized and dropped in

5226-472: Was mothballed the day after its construction was complete, and sat unused for a year before being formally cancelled. $ 372 million dollars were spent on the system during its lifetime. MFTF was the ultimate development of a series of machines at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) that trace their history back to the early 1950s. Over the years one problem after another had been addressed, leading to designs using "baseball" and "yin-yang" mirrors. By

5304-464: Was already a significant amount of research on how to avoid this problem, and at the same 1961 meeting, Mikhail Ioffe presented data from one such design, the "minimum-B", which showed clear signals that it was suppressing this instability. This design added additional current-carrying wires that modified the magnetic field to bend the plasma into a bow-tie shape instead of a simple cylinder. The six conductors were known as "Ioffe bars". A new version of

5382-426: Was completed in 1986 on the very day the project was canceled. Operation of MFTF-B was demonstrated by powering the superconducting magnets, at the time the world's largest, but no experiments were performed. Rollbacks in fusion research funding dramatically reduced funding levels across the entire field. Parts of the MFTF have since been re-used on newer fusion experiments, one of which won a recycling award. In 2021,

5460-399: Was designed and built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), one of the primary research centers for mirror fusion devices. It cost 372 million dollars to construct, making it at the time the most expensive project in the lab's history. It opened on February 21, 1986 and was promptly shut down. The reason given was to balance the United States federal budget . Following on from

5538-439: Was disassembled and TMX built in its place, beginning operations in October 1978. The machine quickly demonstrated that the basic tandem mirror concept was sound. On this basis, LLNL was given the go-ahead to begin the construction of the much larger, and now $ 200 million, MFTF. MFTF was designed to reach Q = 1, also known as "breakeven", and demonstrate a path towards a power producing design. As electrons move more freely in

5616-415: Was essentially an enlarged version of 2XIIB known as MX, setting the initial operational date in 1981. Dean also pointed out that in the longer term, neither baseball or yin-yang seemed to have any obvious advantage in terms of gain , or Q . While MX might match the plasma performance of the newer tokamaks, calculations showed that even in the absolute best case it would be limited to about Q = 1.2, where

5694-479: Was formed in the wake of this crisis and currently comprises 31 member countries. According to the IEA, approximately 4.1 billion barrels (650,000,000 m ) of oil are held in strategic reserves by the member countries, of which 1.4 billion barrels (220,000,000 m ) is government-controlled. The remainder is held by private industry. These reserves are intended to be equivalent to at least 90 days of net imports. At

5772-556: Was illusory, the apparent millisecond-long stability was in fact a millisecond-long delay in the readings, and the plasma was actually becoming unstable immediately. Artsimovich concluded "we now do not have a single experimental fact indicating long and stable confinement." In contrast to the Livermore teams, their Soviet counterparts at the Ioffe Institute were seeing signs of the interchange instability for some time. There

5850-441: Was occurring around the same time that Ronald Reagan declared that the energy crisis was over. In a series of sweeping budget cuts across the entire energy research field, MFTF had its operational budget cancelled, although its construction budget survived. Construction completed in 1986, and the facility sat unused for a year being scavenged for parts by other researchers until it was formally cancelled in 1987 and disassembled. It

5928-412: Was that the magnet was very large relative to the volume of plasma it contained. Livermore's Ken Fowler took this basic design and modified it to produce the "yin-yang" variation, whose magnets were much closer to the plasma. This was built in the 2X series of machines. As the new baseball machines demonstrated gross stability, it appeared that a working fusion reactor could be built using the design. Of

6006-462: Was the addition of more neutral beam injectors , from two to a total of twelve, which would greatly improve the density and temperature of the plasma. 2XIIB was constructed rapidly and began operations in 1975, quickly meeting the performance goals in terms of temperature and density it had set for itself. The success of 2XIIB allowed Dean to get permission in April 1976 to fund the construction of what

6084-423: Was true. By 1960, Livermore had built several ever-larger mirror machines with longer confinement times, and no hint of the problem could be found. The mystery was solved at an international meeting in 1961 when Lev Artsimovich asked if the Livermore teams had calibrated a particular measurement instrument to account for a delay in its readings. They had not; it was immediately realized the stability being measured

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