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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
David R. Mikkelsen, Clifford E. Singer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 237-252
Technical Paper | Special Section Content / Fusion Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22816
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent developments in neutral beam technology prompt us to reconsider the prospects for steady-state tokamak reactors. A mathematical reactor model is developed that includes the physics of beam-driven currents and reactor power balance, as well as reactor and beam system costs. This model is used to find the plasma temperatures that minimize the reactor cost per unit of net electrical output. The optimum plasma temperatures are nearly independent of ß and are roughly twice as high as the optimum temperatures for ignited reactors. If beams of neutral deuterium atoms with near-optimum energies of 1 to 2 MeV are used to drive the current in a reactor the size of the International Tokamak Reactor, then the optimum temperatures are typically Te ≃ 12 to 15 keV and Ti≃ 17 to 21 keV for a wide range of model parameters. Net electrical output rises rapidly with increasing deuterium beam energy for Eb ≾ 400 keV, but rises only slowly above Eb ∼ 1 MeV. We estimate that beam-driven steady-state reactors could be economically competitive with pulsed-ignition reactors if cyclic-loading problems limit the toroidal magnetic field strength of pulsed reactors to ≾85% of that allowed in steady-state reactors.