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Latest News
Zaporizhzhia ‘extremely fragile’ relying on single off-site power line, IAEA warns
Europe’s largest nuclear power plant has just one remaining power line for essential nuclear safety and security functions, compared with its original 10 functional lines before the military conflict with Russia, warned Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
A. Nobile, P. Gobby, A. M. Schwendt, W. P. Steckle, J. K. Hoffer, D. T. Goodin, G. E. Besenbruch, K. R. Schultz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 39 | Number 2 | March 2001 | Pages 684-691
Chamber Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A11963318
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Future inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plants will have a Target Fabrication Facility (TFF) that must produce approximately 500,000 targets per day. To achieve a relatively low cost of electricity, the cost to produce these targets will need to be less than approximately $0.25 per target. In this paper the status on the development of concepts for a TFF to produce targets for a heavy ion fusion (HIF) reactor, such as HYLIFE II, and a laser direct drive fusion reactor such as Sombrero, is discussed. The baseline target that is produced in the HIF TFF is similar to the close-coupled indirect drive target designed by Callahan-Miller and Tabak at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. This target consists of a cryogenic hohlraum that is made of a metal case and a variety of metal foams and metal-doped organic foams. The target contains a DT-filled CH capsule. The baseline direct drive target is the design developed by Bodner and coworkers at Naval Research Laboratory. HIF targets can be filled with DT before or after assembly of the capsule into the hohlraum. Assembly of targets before filling allows assembly operations to be done at room temperature, but tritium inventories are much larger due to the large volume that the hohlraum occupies in the fill system. Assembly of targets cold after filling allows substantial reduction in tritium inventory, but this requires assembly of targets at cryogenic temperature. A model being developed to evaluate the tritium inventories associated with each of the assembly and fill options indicates that filling targets before assembling the capsule into the hohlraum, filling at temperatures as high as possible, and reducing dead-volumes in the fill system as much as possible offers the potential to reduce tritium inventories to acceptable levels. Use of enhanced DT ice layering techniques, such as infrared layering can reduce tritium inventories significantly by reducing the layering time and therefore the number of capsules being layered. Current processes for fabrication of ICF capsules can most likely be easily scaled up to produce capsules at rates needed for an IFE plant.