Related papers: Energy Balance Within Thermonuclear Reactors
Radiation back-fluxes, generated from neutron-material interactions in fusion power reactors, can dramatically impact the plasma dynamics, e.g., by seeding runaway electrons during disruptions via Compton scattering of background electrons…
Compared to the D-T reaction, the neutron-free proton-boron (p-$^{11}$B) fusion has garnered increasing attention in recent years. However, significant Bremsstrahlung losses pose a formidable challenge in p-$^{11}$B plasmas in achieving…
Runaway electrons (REs) are a concern for tokamak fusion reactors from discharge startup to termination. A sudden localized loss of a multi-megaampere RE beam can inflict severe damage to the first wall. Should a disruption occur, the…
A technique, volumetric power optimization, is presented for enhancing the power output of magnetic confinement fusion devices. Applied to a tokamak, this approach involves shifting the burning plasma region to a larger plasma volume while…
Runaway electron populations seeded from the hot-tail generated by the rapid cooling in plasma-terminating disruptions are a serious concern for next-step tokamak devices such as ITER. Here, we present a comprehensive treatment of the…
Fast, counter-streaming plasma outflows drive magnetic field amplification, plasma heating, and particle acceleration in numerous astrophysical environments, from supernova remnant shocks to active galactic nuclei jets. Understanding how,…
Nuclear fusion is a promising clean energy source in which deuterium and tritium fuse inside a magnetically confined plasma in a tokamak, releasing energy. A key challenge on the route to practical nuclear fusion is the control of the…
The dynamics of burning plasmas in tokamaks are crucial for advancing controlled thermonuclear fusion. This study applies the NeuralPlasmaODE, a multi-region multi-timescale transport model, to simulate the complex energy transfer processes…
The plant efficiency of a nuclear fusion power plant is considered. During nominal operation, the plant efficiency is determined by the thermodynamic efficiency and the recirculated power fraction. However, on average the reactor operates…
The understanding of the mechanisms responsible for particle transport is of the utmost importance for magnetized fusion plasmas. A peaked density profile is attractive to improve the fusion rate, which is proportional to the square of the…
This paper shows experimental results from the TCV tokamak that indicate plasma-molecule interactions involving $D_2^+$ and possibly $D^-$ play an important role as sinks of energy (through hydrogenic radiation as well as dissociation) and…
Accurately quantifying the transmutation rate of tungsten (W) under neutron irradiation is a necessary requirement in the assessment of its performance as an armour material in a fusion power plant. The usual approach of calculating average…
In the event of a tokamak disruption in a D-T plasma, fusion-born alpha particles take several milliseconds longer to thermalise than the background. As the damping rates drop drastically following the several orders of magnitudes drop of…
To achieve a high energy gain, the fusion reactor plasma must reach a very high density. However, the tokamak plasmas ofen undergo disruption when the density exceeds the Greenwald density. The density limit disruption in tokamak plasmas is…
We study the energy loss of an energetic heavy quark produced in a high temperature quark-gluon plasma and travelling a finite distance before emerging in the vacuum. While the retardation time of purely collisional energy loss is found to…
Motivated by the possibility that the laws of physics could be different in other regions of space-time, we consider nuclear processes in universes where the weak interaction is either stronger or weaker than observed. We focus on the…
A potential threat to the performance of magnetically confined fusion plasmas is the problem of impurity accumulation, which causes the concentration of highly charged impurity ions to rise uncontrollably in the center of the plasma and…
Nuclear fusion promises a nearly limitless energy source, but achieving breakeven-where fusion output exceeds input-requires extreme plasma conditions and complex confinement systems. Here we propose an alternative approach based on…
Avoidance of the harmful effects of runaway electrons (REs) in plasma-terminating disruptions is pivotal in the design of safety systems for magnetic fusion devices. Here, we describe a computationally efficient numerical tool, that allows…
PROCESS is a reactor systems code - it assesses the engineering and economic viability of a hypothetical fusion power station using simple models of all parts of a reactor system. PROCESS allows the user to choose which constraints to…