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Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
S. K. Ho, Max E. Fenstermacher
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 16 | Number 2 | September 1989 | Pages 185-196
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A29147
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is desirable for the plasma operating points of future Engineering Test Reactor (ETR) tokamaks to be in parameter regimes that are inherently stable to thermal fluctuations; in other words, thermal equilibrium is maintained by properties of the power balance terms themselves without an active burn control system. Methodologies are presented for calculating thermally stable operating points and scenarios to achieve these conditions. Results are given for an ETR tokamak with major radius R0 = 5.8 m in both the ignition and current-drive modes. Though the results are sensitive to the form of the energy confinement scaling law used, for enhancements over L-mode confinement by factors of 1.5 to 2.0, stable operating regions in (n, T) space have been identified for ignited operation with T ≥ 20 keV and for current-drive steady-state operation with T ≈ 25 keV. Burn dynamics simulations and discussion of critical issues are also presented. The analyses are general and should be applicable to a wide variety of deuterium-tritium burning tokamaks.