Within the magnetic fusion energy program in the US, a program called APEX is investigating the use of free flowing liquid surfaces to form the inner surface of the chamber around the plasma. As part of this work, the APEX Team has investigated several possible design implementations and developed a specific engineering concept for a fusion reactor with liquid walls. Our approach has been to utilize an already established design for a future fusion reactor, the ARIES-RS, for the basic chamber geometry and magnetic configuration and to replace the chamber technology in this design with liquid wall technology for a first wall and divertor and a blanket with adequate tritium breeding. This paper gives an overview of one design with a molten salt (a mixture of lithium, beryllium and sodium fluorides) forming the liquid surfaces and a ferritic steel for the structural material of the blanket. The design point is a reactor with 3840MW of fusion power of which 767MW is in the form of energetic particles (alpha power) and 3073MW is in the form of neutrons. The alpha plus auxiliary power total 909MW of which 430MW is radiated from the core mostly onto the first wall and the balance flows into the edge plasma and is distributed between the first wall and the divertor. In pursuing the application of liquid surfaces in APEX, the team has developed analytical tools that are significant achievements themselves and also pursued experiments on flowing liquids. This work is covered elsewhere, but the paper will also note several such areas to indicate the supporting science behind the design presented. Significant new work in modeling the plasma edge to understand the interaction of the plasma with the liquid walls is one example. Another is the incorporation of magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) effects in fluid modeling and heat transfer.
An attractive blanket concept for the fusion reactor is the dual coolant Pb-17Li liquid (DCLL) breeder design. Reduced activation ferritic steel (RAFS) is used as the structural material. Helium is used to cool the first wall and blanket structure, and the selfcooled breeder Pb-17Li is circulated for power conversion and for tritium breeding. A SiC f /SiC composite insert is used as the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) insulation to reduce the impact from the MHD pressure drop of the circulating Pb-17Li and as the thermal insulator to separate the high temperature Pb-17Li from the helium cooled RAFS structure.have proposed a test plan for the DCLL ITER-Test Blanket Module program.
A practical method is proposed for the fast shutdown of a large ignited tokamak.
The method consists of injecting a rapid series of 30-45 (6 mm) deuterium pellets doped with a small
(0.0005%) concentration of krypton impurity, and simultaneously ramping the plasma current and
shaping fields down over a period of several seconds using the poloidal field system. Detailed modelling
with the Tokamak Simulation Code using a newly developed pellet mass deposition model shows
that this method should terminate the discharge in a controlled and stable way without producing
significant numbers of runaway electrons. A partial prototyping of this technique was accomplished
in TFTR.
The Tritium Migration Analysis Progam, Version 4 (TMAP4) has been developed by the Fusion Safety Program at the Idaho National Engineering Imboratol 3, (INEL) as a safety analysis code, mainly to analyze tritium retention and loss in fusion reactor structures and systems during normal operation and accident conditions. TMAP4 incorporates one-dimensional thermal-and mass-diffusive transport and trapping calculations through structures and zero dimensional fluid transport between enclosures and across the interface between enclosures and structures. A key feature is the ability to input problem definition parameters as constants, interpolation rabies, or FORTRAN equations. The code is specifically intended for use under a DOS operating system on PC-type mini-computers, but it has also been run successfully on workstations and rnainframe computer systems. Use of the equation-input feature requires access to a FORTRAN-77 compiler and a linker progr'-im.
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