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The characteristics of a fast ignition heavy ion fusion~FIHIF! power plant are preliminarily evaluated. The reactor chamber consists of two sections: The upper smaller part is the microexplosion section proper; the lower bigger part is the condensation section, in which sprayed jets of coolant are injected. The first surface of the blanket is of generally accepted wetted porous design. The coolant is lithium-lead eutectic with an initial surface temperature of 820 K. The mass of the evaporated coolant just after the explosion is evaluated as 4 kg. Computation of neutronics results in blanket energy deposition with maximum density of the order of 10 8 J0m 3 at the first wall. The heat conversion system consisting of three coolant loops provides a net efficiency of the FIHIF power plant of 0.37.

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Recently the “fast ignition” method in the ICF problem was considered (Caruso & Pais, 1996). It allows increasing a target gain factor and raising reliability of the burning process. Since the required power of the irradiating beam in this method is unattainable for the traditional type of heavy ion driver with the energy of ions ≤10 GeV, the powerful laser is considered as a possible driver only. Here we investigate the fast ignition method for a system constituted from the directly irradiated cylindrical target and a powerful heavy ion driver of the charge-symmetric type (Koshkarev, 1993) in which the ions with energy ≈100 GeV and mass ≈200 are used. The actual design of a powerful heavy ion driver with the required characteristics is outside the purpose of this article. However some consideration will be given to exploring whether such a performance is within the realm of reasonable extrapolations of the present state of the art.

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