Alcator C-Mod Weekly Highlights
			December 13, 1999


	The maintenance period continued on Alcator C-Mod last week.  Effort
was focused into invessel activities, J-port RF antenna changes, the DNB,
and maintenance and upgrades to several machine systems.


Engineering:

Work continued invessel last week with the removal of the J-port antenna
and the D and E-port antenna current straps.  Numerous changes will be
made to the J-port antenna to eliminate arcing between end plates and the
associated protection tiles, ensure proper tile alignment, and to also
eliminate arcing between the current straps and Faraday shield ceramic
washers.  A meeting was held last Monday with MIT and PPPL personnel
to discuss the J-port antenna and arrive at solutions.  Randy Wilson,
Gerd Schilling, and Joel Hosea attended from PPPL.  The current straps
from all the antennas are being cleaned up and replated.   Work also
continued on the design, machining, and testing of boron nitride tiles
and tile hold-down hardware.  Other invessel work included spatial
calibrations of the visible bremsstrahlung array and scanning probes.

Work on the DNB consisted mainly of debugging electronics, checking and
adding interlocks, continuing tests of the MOD/REG, and making plans for
operation of the power system into the beamline.

The maintenance of the LN2 cooling manifold, power systems, heater system,
and alternator continued last week.  The upgrade to the transmitter cooling
system made very good progress.

Hardware for video and audio conferencing was delivered, and a
preliminary installation was done in our conference room.  This system
adds high quality room audio, and video images to our existing remote
presentation capabilities.

This new setup was used to broadcast the C-Mod Ideas Forum last week.
There were attendees  from both PPPL and GA via the video conference.
Many others received the audio and viewgraphs over the internet. Despite
some first use glitches, the system worked well.  Telephone connections
via the ESnet audio bridge were the main thing that did not work, despite
repeated calls to ESnet help desk.  We are proceeding with a permanent
installation of the equipment.


Physics:

The 1999 Alcator C-Mod Ideas Forum was held at MIT on Tuesday and Wednesday of 
last week. The purpose of the forum was to obtain input from a wide range of 
interested parties regarding possible experiments to be carried out on C-Mod. A 
total of 85 new ideas were presented, along with brief summaries of the status 
and existing plans in each of the major programmatic areas. The sessions were 
well-attended by C-Mod staff and collaborators, and were also broadcast for 
remote participants. 

Of the 85 presentations we had by institution:

        GA       3
        MIT     51
        UTx     17
        PPPL     6
        ORNL     2
        NYU      2
        UCSD     1
        LANL     2
        Trintech 1 (former PPPL employee)

By topic (as presented, some fit more than one area):

        Core transport & Stability      22
        ICRF Current & Flow Drive        7
        Divertor & Edge Studies         19
        Pedestal Transport              23
        High Performance & Operations   12
        Other                            2


Travel and Visits:

The Ideas Forum brought many scientists together from GA, PPPL, UTx, ORNL,
NYU, and of course MIT.  The list of presenters can be found at
http://www.psfc.mit.edu/cmod/forum2000/talks_2000.html.
The viewgraphs are being made available via links on the Agenda page to
http://www.psfc.mit.edu/cmod/forum2000/agenda_2000.html