Related papers: Energy Balance Within Thermonuclear Reactors
Grid decarbonization for climate change requires dispatchable carbon-free energy like nuclear fusion. The tokamak concept offers a promising path for fusion, but one of the foremost challenges in implementation is the occurrence of…
It is planned to use atomic processes to spread out most of the heating power over the first wall and side walls to reduce the heat loads on the plasma facing components in ITER to ~ 50 MW. Calculations indicate that there will be 100 MW in…
Nuclear fusion requires overcoming or traversing a repulsive Coulomb barrier of hundreds of kiloelectronvolts, rendering the probability of fusion at sub-keV energies vanishingly small. Yet in condensed matter, the electronic and structural…
The optimal configuration choice between positive triangularity (PT) and negative triangularity (NT) tokamaks for fusion power plants hinges on navigating different operational constraints rather than achieving specific plasma performance…
The physical sciences require models tailored to specific nuances of different dynamics. In this work, we study outcome predictions in nuclear fusion tokamaks, where a major challenge are \textit{disruptions}, or the loss of plasma…
Aneutronic and nonradioactive properties make the proton-boron fusion a prospective candidate for fusion energy production through reactions following p+$^{11}$B$\rightarrow$3${\alpha}$ (p-$^{11}$B). However, it is difficult to achieve a…
We present first-principles numerical calculations of the depolarization rate of spin-polarized deuterium and tritium nuclei in realistic tokamak plasmas, driven by resonant interactions with plasma waves. Backed up by first-of-a-kind…
The possibility of fusion ignition in proton-Boron$^{11}$ plasma is strongly enhanced if the energy from the fusion-produced $\alpha$ particles is channeled to fast protons, but in an environment in which most of the protons are thermally…
We have carried out a detailed analysis that compares steady state versus pulsed tokamak reactors. The motivations are as follows. Steady state current drive has turned out to be more difficult than expected - it takes too many watts to…
A recent proposal of accelerator based fusion reactor considers a scheme where an ion beam from the accelerator hits the target plasma on the resonance of the fusion reaction so that the reactivity ($\sigma v$) can be an order of magnitude…
During disruptions in fusion-grade tokamaks like ITER, large electric fields are induced following the thermal quench (TQ) period which can generate a substantial amount of Runaway Electrons (REs) that can carry up to 10 MA current with…
The Tore Supra tokamak is the largest superconducting magnetic fusion facility, has been devoted to long-duration high-performance discharge research. With a steady-state magnetic field and water cooled plasma facing components, discharges…
A feasibility study of fusion reactors based on accelerators is carried out. We consider a novel scheme where a beam from the accelerator hits the target plasma on the resonance of the fusion reaction and establish characteristic criteria…
The conventional approach for thermal quench mitigation in a tokamak disruption is through a high-Z impurity injection that radiates away the plasma's thermal energy before it reaches the wall. The downside is a robust Ohmic-to-runaway…
The efficient production of electricity from nuclear fusion in magnetically confined plasmas relies on a good confinement of the thermal energy. For more than thirty years, the observation that such confinement depends on the mass of the…
The ongoing development of electromagnets based on High Temperature Superconductors has led to the conceptual exploration of high-magnetic-field fusion reactors of the tokamak type, operating at on-axis fields above 10 T. In this work we…
The fusion of deuterium (D) with tritium (T) is the most promising of the reactions that could power the thermonuclear reactors of the future. Already favored for its low activation energy and high yield, it may lead to even more efficient…
A stellarator design is described with the purpose of achieving three goals: (1) Enhance the confinement time of tritium. (2) Have a sufficient density of high-Z impurities to radiate the thermal power escaping from the core while having an…
Plasma disruptions represent a critical challenge for high-performance tokamak operations, as they can compromise machine integrity and reduce operational availability. Although future fusion devices essentially need to incorporate…
New plasma regimes with high confinement, low core impurity accumulation and small Edge localized mode (ELMs) perturbations have been obtained close to ITER conditions in magnetically confined plasmas from the Joint European torus (JET)…