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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.
John-Patrick Floyd, W. M. Stacey
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 3 | April 2012 | Pages 227-235
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13535
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The presence of a large pinch velocity in the edge pedestal of high-confinement (H-mode) tokamak plasmas implies that particle transport in the plasma edge must be treated by a generalized pinch-diffusion theory, rather than a pure diffusion theory. An investigation of extending the numerical solution methodology of the standard diffusion theory to the solution of the generalized pinch-diffusion theory has been carried out. It is found that in the edge pedestal, where the inward pinch velocity is large in H-mode plasmas, a finer mesh spacing will be required than is necessary for similar accuracy farther inward, where the pinch velocity diminishes. An expression for the numerical error in various finite-differencing algorithms is presented.