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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.
I. García-Cortés, F. L. Tabarés, D. Tafalla, R. Balbín, J. M. Carmona, A. Hidalgo, J. A. Ferreira, A. López-Fraguas, K. J. McCarthy, V. I. Vargas, TJ-II Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 307-312
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1251
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutral beam injection (NBI) heating in the TJ-II stellarator faces the particular challenge of unwanted particle sources, which for relatively low injected powers drive the plasma to collapse at relatively low values of line density. This effect is aggravated by an enhancement of particle confinement that occurs as density increases. At present, candidate magnetic topologies that make use of intrinsic islands at the plasma edge are being investigated experimentally. This concept uses magnetic configurations having a rotational transform with a rational value at the edge, i.e., an island divertor (ID). Recently, impurity injection experiments have been performed for ID and limiter configurations to investigate the divertor effect in TJ-II. Indeed, the enhanced screening of injected impurities, as well as the low intrinsic plasma contamination found in these ID plasmas, points to such magnetic configurations as being good candidates for the NBI experimental program in TJ-II.