The Lithium Tokamak eXperiment (LTX) - Status and Plans

The LTX is the first toroidal device with a fully non-recycling wall almost completely surrounding the plasma. Such a plasma- facing component (PFC) is expected to lead to a new plasma regime with flat T$_{e}$ profiles, and the LTX goal is to explore its confinement and stability. The LTX is a spherical tokamak designed to have R=40 cm, a=26 cm, B$_{t}$=3.4 kG, I$_{p}$=400 kA, T$_{e}$=1 keV, and T$_{i}$=200 eV, for discharges of 100 ms or more. It contains a shell with four segments, each made of 0.375$''$-thick copper and a 0.0625$''$-thick stainless steel liner. A lithium layer, up to 100 nm thick, will be vapor deposited on the liner between shots. For a non- recycling PFC, the lithium will be kept chemically active with a shell temperature above the lithium melting point. The first tokamak experiments with large area liquid lithium PFC's used a toroidal liquid lithium limiter in the Current Drive eXperiment - Upgrade (CDX-U). To compare with CDX-U results, initial experiments will be performed with a toroidal liquid lithium ``pool'' in the lower half of the LTX shell. Assembly of LTX is complete, and preparations for plasma operations are in progress.