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Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
V. Ya. Goloborod'ko, V. V. Lutsenko, S. N. Reznik, V. A. Yavorskij
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 27 | Number 3 | May 1995 | Pages 292-297
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30391
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Three-dimensional Fokker-Planck simulation of collisional losses of mega-electron-volt fusion products in axisymmetric tokamaks with plasma currents I < 2 MA is carried out. The calculations take into account both loss due to radial diffusion and loss caused by pitch-angle scattering in the first-orbit loss region in velocity space. Collisional losses of deuterium-deuterium (D-D) fusion products in the energy range 0.5 ≤ ε/ε0 ≤ 1 (where ε0 is the birth energy) are found to be increased with plasma current and comparable to a first-orbit loss at I > 1.5 MA. The loss mechanism considered may be responsible for the observed experimentally delayed losses of D-D fusion products in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR). The dependencies of collisional losses on plasma current, effective charge number of the plasma (Zeff), and aspect ratio are investigated. The distributions of escaped ions over pitch angles, energies, and poloidal angles are evaluated. The fraction of collisionally lost fast fusion products is shown to scale like (ν⊥/νs)0.6 or (here ν⊥ and νs are characteristic collision rates of pitch-angle scattering and slowing down, respectively). The approach used may be considered as an alternative to the approach based on Monte Carlo modeling of scattering and can serve as a validity check of the latter.