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Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
G. J. Hartwell, S. F. Knowlton, J. D. Hanson, D. A. Ennis, D. A. Maurer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 1 | July 2017 | Pages 76-90
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1291046
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Compact Toroidal Hybrid (CTH) is a low-aspect-ratio (), low-beta (%) torsatron with a major radius of . CTH is operable as a pure stellarator, but most research on this device is conducted with hybrid discharges in which a toroidal plasma current is driven in order to study magnetohydrodynamic instabilities and disruptions in current-carrying stellarator plasmas. The vacuum helical field of CTH is produced by a continuously wound helical coil with poloidal and toroidal periodicities of and , respectively. The maximum on-axis toroid al magnetic field is . The helical coil encloses a circular vacuum vessel of major radius = 0.75 m with a circular cross section of minor radius 0.29 m. A toroidal plasma current up to 80 kA is produced with an ohmic heating (OH) transformer. The average plasma radius is typically 0.20 m. Five independently controllable magnet coil sets produce the base stellarator magnetic field configuration. With 15-kW electro.n cyclotron heating at the fundamental frequency, densities of and electron temperatures of 20 eV are achieved. With the addition of OH, densities reach with temperatures of . Ten motor/generator power supplies provide up to 10 MW of power to energize the magnet set providing the equilibrium field, and a capacitor bank provides the pulsed current for the OH system. Design considerations, constraints, and construction techniques of the CTH magnet coils, vacuum vessel, and support structure are discussed, and an operational overview is given.