Physics of magnetic confinement fusion

Wagner, F.

doi:10.1051/epjconf/20135401007

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The most successful confinement concepts are toroidal ones like tokamaks and helical systems like stellarators (Wagner 2012 , 2013 ). To avoid drift losses, two magnetic field components are necessary for confinement and stability—the toroidal and the poloidal field component.…”

Section: Future Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nuclear power in the 21st century: Challenges and possibilities

Horváth

Rachlew

2015

Ambio

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The current situation and possible future developments for nuclear power—including fission and fusion processes—is presented. The fission nuclear power continues to be an essential part of the low-carbon electricity generation in the world for decades to come. There are breakthrough possibilities in the development of new generation nuclear reactors where the life-time of the nuclear waste can be reduced to some hundreds of years instead of the present time-scales of hundred thousand of years. Research on the fourth generation reactors is needed for the realisation of this development. For the fast nuclear reactors, a substantial research and development effort is required in many fields—from material sciences to safety demonstration—to attain the envisaged goals. Fusion provides a long-term vision for an efficient energy production. The fusion option for a nuclear reactor for efficient production of electricity has been set out in a focussed European programme including the international project of ITER after which a fusion electricity DEMO reactor is envisaged.

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Section: Future Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nuclear power in the 21st century: Challenges and possibilities

Horváth

Rachlew

2015

Ambio

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“…Research on plasma physics as part of the struggle to develop thermonuclear fusion as a technically viable source of energy dates back to the fifties in the past century (Wagner 2013;Horvath & Rachlew 2016;Prǎvǎlie & Bandoc 2018). The most promising approach to the problem, namely the magnetic confinement of a highly conducting ionized gas, has given rise to several distinct proposals for designs of fusion reactors, such as the tokamak (Kadomtsev 1966), stellarator (Spitzer 1958), spheromak (Bellan 2000), spherical tokamak (Sykes et al 1997), reversed field pinch (Strauss et al 2017), etc.…”

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confidence: 99%

Electron skin depth in low density plasmas

Silveira

Siqueira

2020

J. Plasma Phys.

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We rescale the generalized Ohm’s law and consider the limits that imply the electric field which moves with an ideal (inviscid and perfectly conducting) plasma be proportional to the time rate of change of the current density. Therefore, we show that those limits are satisfied by a sufficiently low electron number density, $n_{\text{e}}$ . We also show that the electron–ion collision frequency, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}_{\text{ei}}$ , is much smaller than the ion cyclotron frequency, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}_{\text{ci}}$ . The combination of that condition with the Lawson criterion for a typical deuterium–tritium fusion in ITER reveals a lower bound for the geometric mean of the confinement time, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{\text{C}}$ , and collision interval, $\sqrt{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{\text{C}}/\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}_{\text{ei}}}\gg 10^{-5}~\text{s}$ . For that reaction, we estimate that $n_{\text{e}}\sim 10^{19}~\text{m}^{-3}$ , and contrast typical parameters of our fully ionized gas with those of warm, hot and thermonuclear plasmas. When, in addition, $n_{\text{e}}$ varies slowly in time and weakly in space, we generalize Alfvén’s theorem, by showing that the frozen-in condition holds true for an effective magnetic field, which depends on a finite electron skin depth. We perform a (divergenceless) helical perturbation on an axisymmetric equilibrium, to derive a dispersion relation in the cylindrical tokamak limit, and, subsequently, apply our analytical formulation to the peaked model, which assumes a logarithmic derivative profile for the poloidal component of the equilibrium magnetic field. In that formulation, the definition of the safety factor in terms of the effective field yields a shift in the magnetic surfaces. We find that the instability peak may triple that predicted on neglect of a finite electron mass. We also find that inertial effects may centuple the radius of the stable cylindrical column.

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