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The New Energy Reality
Published in Anco S. Blazev, Energy Security for The 21st Century, 2021
Major challenges still remain, however, in making magnetic confinement fusion work reliably on the scale of a power plant. For example, how to sustain a large volume of extremely hot plasma (millions of degrees F) for long periods of time, at pressures that will allow for a large net energy gain from the fusion reaction.
Inertially Confined Fusion
Published in Leon J. Radziemski, David A. Cremers, Laser-Induced Plasmas and Applications, 2020
Robert L. McCrory, John M. Soures
Two general schemes have been investigated in the past 40 years as means to confine fusion plasmas. Magnetic confinement fusion depends on the use of high-intensity magnetic fields (in excess of several teslas) to confine a relatively low-density (1014/cm3) plasma for times on the order of tens of seconds. This scheme has been pursued as an international research effort for the last 30 years and is now a mature technology whose future development prospects are limited primarily by the size, cost, and complexity of the required devices (see, e.g., Conn, 1981).
Energy: The Future
Published in Heinz Knoepfel, Energy 2000, 2017
With the two closed (toroidal) configurations of the so-called stellarator and tokamak type, an enormous progress in magnetic confinement fusion has been achieved during the past 30 years: the confinement parameter has improved 100 000 times, and the temperature nearly 1 000 times (but not on the same experiments, as shown in Fig. 5.4).
Acceleration of three-dimensional Tokamak magnetohydrodynamical code with graphics processing unit and OpenACC heterogeneous parallel programming
Published in International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics, 2019
H. W. Zhang, J. Zhu, Z. W. Ma, G. Y. Kan, X. Wang, W. Zhang
Magnetic confinement fusion is a method of using a magnetic field to confine a high-temperature fusion fuel, deuterium-tritium plasma, to generate thermonuclear fusion energy. There are different kinds of magnetically confined fusion devices in operation or under construction around the world, mainly Tokamaks, such as the DIII-D Tokamak (Evans et al. 2005) in the U.S., the Joint European Torus (JET) Tokamak (Liang et al. 2007) in Europe, the EAST Tokamak (Wan 2009) in China, the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) Stellarator (Renner et al. 2000) in Germany, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) under construction (Bécoulet et al. 2008), and the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) under design (Song et al. 2014). Because phenomena observed in these devices are too complex to be studied analytically, computational simulation becomes a powerful tool to investigate their inside physical mechanisms.
The Impacts of Liquid Metal Plasma-Facing Components on Fusion Reactor Safety and Tritium Management
Published in Fusion Science and Technology, 2019
Paul W. Humrickhouse, Brad J. Merrill, Su-Jong Yoon, Lee C. Cadwallader
One of the outstanding challenges on the path to magnetic confinement fusion is engineering of the plasma-facing components (PFCs), which must be able to withstand the high heat and particle fluxes incident upon them. A solid divertor, for which tungsten alloys are presently the only viable candidate materials, must do so with a minimum of erosion, melting, and cracking, in the face of plasma-surface interactions, high-radiation damage, temperature gradients, and concomitant thermal stresses. Such difficulties are exacerbated by any attempt to design a more compact reactor. One potential solution to these issues is to employ a liquid metal (LM) as a plasma-facing surface. Such a continually replenished PFC has the potential to mitigate some of the aforementioned structural concerns and remove heat via convection or evaporation.