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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
T. Sehmer, K. Lackner, E. Strumberger, E. Fable, O. Kardaun, P. McCarthy, ASDEX Upgrade Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 1 | July 2016 | Pages 73-82
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-175
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Modern tokamaks, operating with elongated plasmas, are unstable against vertical displacement. In the presence of conducting walls, this instability assumes the characteristics of a resistive wall mode (RWM), amenable to feedback stabilization. On ASDEX Upgrade (AUG), estimates of the growth rates, entering into the definition of safe operating regimes and into feedback parameter settings, were so far based on a rigid displacement (RD) model. However, for highly triangular plasmas this model was found to predict growth rates that were too small. A code package originally developed for general ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) RWMs (NEMEC/CAS3D/STARWALL) and also capable of handling three-dimensional passive stabilizing loops (PSLs) was therefore applied to the n = 0 case for a large data sample of possible AUG equilibria. The comparison with the previously used rigid vertical displacement model showed that the latter gives a consistently lower limit to the growth rates for typical AUG parameters. A statistical analysis of the RD results brings out the stabilizing effect of triangularity. This stabilizing effect disappears, however, if generalized displacements are taken into account, like in the full MHD resistive wall model. The mode acquires a strong m = 2 component, which allows it also to elude partly the stabilization by the PSL. At low elongation, large triangularity produces even significant additional destabilization, with the mode predominantly m = 2, confined to the outer plasma layers, like predicted in references [see Rosen et al., Phys. Fluids, 18, 482 (1975) and Becker and Lackner, Proc. 6th Int. Conf. Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research, Vol. II, p. 401 (1977)]. These results explain the tendencies observed in AUG and will be taken into account in future analyses.