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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.
F. S. Zaitsev, S. Matejcik, A. Murari, E. P. Suchkov, JET-EFDA Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 62 | Number 2 | October 2012 | Pages 366-373
Selected Paper from the Seventh Fusion Data Validation Workshop 2012 (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-476
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In tokamaks, the problem of plasma current density and safety factor reconstruction, given the available measurements, can be strongly unstable with respect to the input data. Different constraints are used in practice to make the problem more stable. Traditionally, methods for equilibrium reconstruction search for one solution of the Grad-Shafranov equation with a set of constraints. However, the questions of the efficiency of a constraint in selecting a solution; the required accuracy of the measurements; the existence of very different solutions, which are compatible with the measurement errors; and the detailed assessment of the reconstruction confidence intervals are not addressed. This paper presents a numerical algorithm, based on the -net technique, which provides answers to all these questions. Examples of application of the method to the analysis of ITER- and JET-like plasmas are given.