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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
E. A. Mogahed, H. Y. Khater, J. F. Santarius
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 39 | Number 2 | March 2001 | Pages 639-643
Fusion Materials | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A11963310
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A tritium-breeding blanket design is investigated for a D-T Field-Reversed Configuration (FRC) scoping study. The thrust of our initial effort on the blanket has been to seek solutions as close to present-day technology as possible, and we have therefore focused on steel structure with helium coolant. The simple FRC cylindrical geometry has allowed us reasonable success due to the low FRC magnetic field and relatively easy maintenance. In this design the breeder is Li2O tubes. The design is modular with 10 modules each 2.5 m long. The inner radius of the first wall is 2.0 m and the FW/blanket/shield thickness is about 2 m. The surface heat flux will be radiation dominated, fairly uniform, and relatively low, because most of the charged particles follow the magnetic flux tubes to the end walls. The neutron wall loading is 5 MW/m2. In this design the surface heat flux equals 0.19 MW/m2. The maximum Li2O tube temperature is 1003°C. The helium exit temperature from the heat exchanger is about 800°C which allows a thermal efficiency of about 52%. The local tritium breeding ratio (TBR) equals 1.1 and is sufficient because in the FRC geometry the plasma has nearly full coverage. The helium pumping power is 1 MW. The coolant routing is optimized to limit the steel maximum temperature to 635°C. The same concept would be applicable to a spherical torus and spheromak.