Alcator C-Mod Weekly Highlights
			      December 8, 1997
 

Plasma operation of Alcator C-Mod began today with full length clean
discharges beginning as soon as all power supplies were brought back
on line. Plasma current was successfully increased to 1MA, and the RF
power was brought up to 3.9 MW.  H-modes were readily obtained, with some
indications of EDA.

Reinstallation of the alternator instrumentation and control systems was
completed last week. The alternator was brought up to full speed on Saturday
and excitation was successfully applied.

We continue to make progress on the DNB.  Assembly of the oil
conditioning system for the accelerator supply was completed.  Breadboarding
of one channel of the fast isolation amplifier, a critical component
for beam profile monitoring electronics, was completed, and initial tests were
positive.  The Mod/Reg protection crowbar was assembled and successfully
high potted to 90kV.  Successful test firings of the crowbar have been
conducted at up to 60 kV.  Because of limited size of available penetrations
in the cell wall, a short, high capacitance section must be inserted into
the HV transmission line linking the beamline in the cell to its power
supplies in the power area.  The detailed mechanical design of this section
was completed last week and fabrication started.

Transmitters #1 and #2 were tested last week in preparation for the
latest run campaign.  One of three tuning calibrations was completed.
The remaining calibrations must be completed during plasma operation.  This
run period will be the first with the new tuned arc detectors operational.
These detectors will greatly reduce the coupling between transmitters #1 and
#2 fault circuitry and should therefore reduce the number of retries.

Tom Gibney and Phyllis Roney, PPPL, Bill Meyer and Jeff Moller, LLNL, and Dave
Schissel and Jeff Schachter, General Atomics, are visiting this week to
receive MDSplus internals training and to discuss the MDSplus porting
collaboration.  Most of these people will be involved with porting MDSplus
to UNIX and WNT.  Stewart Zweben from PPPL was here on Friday to give
a seminar.  He also worked with Earl Marmar setting up the SRL Sieve
Interferometer (fluctuation diagnostic) in the lab and testing its response.
James Callen visited from U. of Wisconsin to discuss transport issues and
give a seminar.

Steve Wukitch returned from a visit at PPPL for the NSTX preliminary
antenna design review.  He also visited with Dr. Stefano Bernabei to
discuss the proposed lower hybrid experiment on Alcator C-Mod.  He
met with Dr. J.R. Wilson and other PPPL ICRF physicists to discuss
the C-Mod ICRF collaboration and progress on the new 4 strap antenna.
Joe Snipes was at the NSTX open forum at PPPL last week where he participated
in discussions of diagnostic systems for this new machine.