689 



Small Facilities 



The Monbusho university program in basic research is built around a 

 variety of small- to intermediate-scale experiments at several 

 locations (Uchida, 1983). GAMMA-10 tandem mirror at Tsukuba, 

 Heliotron E stellarator at Kyoto, and JIPPT tokamak and NBT bumpy 

 torus at Nagoya are the largest. The Institute of Plasma Physics 

 (IPP) at Nagoya has proposed to build a larger reacting plasma tokoroak 

 and is using this proposal as justification for acquiring a new site. 

 Larger tandem mirror, heliotron, and laser fusion experiments have 

 been proposed. It is generally acknowledged that only one of these 

 will be approved because of financial constraints. The Monbusho 

 program on alternative confinement concepts is active and productive. 

 It is anticipated that an intermediate-sized device costing about $200 

 million will be authorized within the next year or two. Apparently 

 there is a tacit agreement that any new alternate concept magnetic 

 confinement experiment will be located at IPP. 



The Monbusho program accounted in 1981 for 22 percent of the 

 budget, about a third of which was allocated to the inertial 

 confinement progreun at Osaka University. None of these figures 

 includes personnel costs, which are separately funded. 



STA also supports a reversed-f ield pinch experiment at the 

 Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL) . Most of these machines are more 

 recent versions of similar U.S. devices. They benefit signficantly 

 from the U.S. experience, the availability of better instrumentation 

 and computers, and the traditional Japanese attention to detail and 

 quality workmanship. Some of these facilities have supercomputers 

 (Fujitsu Falcom-100, which is comparable to the Cray-1 computer in the 

 United States) available for analysis and data processing. 



Particularly noteworthy among the development efforts is the work 

 on superconducting coils conducted at JAERI and ETL. 



Cooperation on research at the university and national-laboratory 

 level (generally charcterized as pure science) with unrestricted 

 publication of results and international exchange of scientific 

 information is a democratic tradition that has served both Japan and 

 the United States well over the years. Exchanges of personnel between 

 laboratories (especially postdoctoral fellows) have enhanced this 

 traditional mode of international cooperation. While smaller-scale 

 cooperation of this sort is useful, it was not the main thrust of our 

 visit to Japan. 



Key Groups and Attitudes in the Japanese Fusion Effort 



JAERI clearly has the intiative in Japan's large-scale fusion 

 development. The Nuclear Fusion Council of the Atomic Energy 

 Commission seems supportive of the JAEia program. STA seems to be the 

 government agency with the greatest responsibility for large-scale 

 fusion. 



