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Playing the “bad guy” to enhance next-generation safety
Sometimes, cops and robbers is more than just a kid’s game. At the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, researchers are channeling their inner saboteurs to discover vulnerabilities in next-generation nuclear reactors, making sure that they’re as safe as possible before they’re even constructed.
N. Hosogane, the JT-60 Team, JFT-2M Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 363-369
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A717
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For steady state advanced tokamak research with long pulse operations, JT-60U tokamak discharge, NBI and RF heating injection durations have been extended from 15 s to 65 s and from 10 s to 30 s respectively mainly by means of modifying their control systems and using derated power levels. In addition, technological issues for their long pulse injections with the heating systems have been solved as follows. The ion source of the negative ion NBI system was modified to increase gas conductance in the accelerator, which reduced the heat load to the grounded grid due to stripping loss to a level that enables operations of 2 MW for 30 s. A new method of controlling the anode voltage has been developed for sustaining the oscillation condition of a gyrotron in the electron cyclotron (EC) system. With this method, the EC injection duration has reached 16 s at 0.4 MW. To avoid serious damage of the LH launcher, a heat-resistant carbon grill LH antenna was implemented on the original stainless steel grill. To date, the advanced tokamak operations have been extended to N = 2.1 for 20 s. In JFT-2M, high N plasmas had been investigated with the vacuum vessel covered with ferritic steels. N of ~3.5 was obtained with rwall/a~1.3-1.6 without serious influence of ferromagnetic walls (rwall is distance of the wall from a plasma center and a is minor radius of a plasma). This encourages the utilization of ferric steel as a structural material for future reactors.