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Playing the “bad guy” to enhance next-generation safety
Sometimes, cops and robbers is more than just a kid’s game. At the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, researchers are channeling their inner saboteurs to discover vulnerabilities in next-generation nuclear reactors, making sure that they’re as safe as possible before they’re even constructed.
A. D. Beklemishev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 184-186
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11603
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Some open traps, like GOL-3, may be heated by axial electron beams. Since the heating is turbulent, it is associated with anomalous resistivity, so that the reverse induction current is pushed out to flow in the shell plasma along the beam edge. It is shown that such complicated distribution of axial current in equilibrium causes exponential amplification along the trap of any initial (at entrance) azimuthal modulation of the beam current density. As a result, the shape of the beam cross-section develops features like spiral arms, etc. at the end-plate, even if its shape was nearly circular at the entrance. Amplification occurs whenever there is an off-axis extremum on the radial distribution of the axial current density.