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Smarter waste strategies: Helping deliver on the promise of advanced nuclear
At COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, a clear consensus emerged: Nuclear energy must be a cornerstone of the global clean energy transition. With electricity demand projected to soar as we decarbonize not just power but also industry, transport, and heat, the case for new nuclear is compelling. More than 20 countries committed to tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy forecasts that the country’s current nuclear capacity could more than triple, adding 200 GW of new nuclear to the existing 95 GW by mid-century.
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.