Broadening of the Divertor Heat Flux Profile in High Confinement Tokamak Fusion Plasmas with Edge Pedestals Limited by Turbulence in DIII-D.

Multimachine empirical scaling predicts an extremely narrow heat exhaust layer in future high magnetic field tokamaks, producing high power densities that require mitigation. In the experiments presented, the width of this exhaust layer is nearly doubled using actuators to increase turbulent transport in the plasma edge. This is achieved in low collisionality, high confinement edge pedestals with their gradients limited by turbulent transport instead of large-scale, coherent instabilities. The exhaust heat flux profile width and divertor leg diffusive spreading both double as a high frequency band of turbulent fluctuations propagating in the electron diamagnetic direction doubles in amplitude. The results are quantitatively reproduced in electromagnetic XGC particle-in-cell simulations which show the heat flux carried by electrons emerges to broaden the heat flux profile, directly supported by Langmuir probe measurements.

Gyrokinetic Fokker-Planck collision operator.

The gyrokinetic linearized exact Fokker-Planck collision operator is obtained in a form suitable for plasma gyrokinetic equations, for arbitrary mass ratio. The linearized Fokker-Planck operator includes both the test-particle and field-particle contributions, and automatically conserves particles, momentum, and energy, while ensuring non-negative entropy production. Finite gyroradius effects in both field-particle and test-particle terms are evaluated. When implemented in gyrokinetic simulations, these effects can be precomputed. The field-particle operator at each time step requires the evaluation of a single two-dimensional integral, and is not only more accurate, but appears to be less expensive to evaluate than conserving model operators.

Comparative analysis of scrapie agent inactivation methods.

A scrapie-infected hamster brain homogenate was subjected to several different potential inactivation methods. Methods included autoclaving for various lengths of time, either alone or in combination with different concentrations of sodium hydroxide or LpH, an aqueous acid phenolic derivative (Calgon Vestal Laboratories in St. Louis, MO). Inactivation treatments utilizing either NaOH or LpH alone were also evaluated. It was determined that several of the treatments inactivated all of the detectable infectivity.