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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.
Dale M. Meade
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 393-399
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Experimental Devices and Advanced Designs | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A720
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The overall vision for FIRE is to develop and test the fusion plasma physics and plasma technologies needed to realize capabilities of the ARIES-RS/AT power plant designs. The mission of FIRE is to attain, explore, understand and optimize a fusion dominated plasma which would be satisfied by producing DT fusion plasmas with nominal fusion gains ~10, self-driven currents of [is approximately to]80%, fusion power ~ 150 - 300 MW and pulse lengths up to 40 s. Achieving these goals will require the deployment of several key fusion technologies under conditions approaching those of ARIES-RS/AT. The FIRE plasma configuration with strong plasma shaping, a double null pumped divertor and all metal plasma facing components is a 40% scale model of the ARIES-RS/AT plasma configuration. "Steady-state" advanced tokamak modes in FIRE with high , high bootstrap fraction and 100% non-inductive current drive are suitable for testing the physics of the ARIES-RS/AT operating modes. The development of techniques to handle power plant relevant exhaust power while maintaining low tritium inventory is a major objective for a burning plasma experiment. The FIRE H-modes and AT-modes result in fusion power densities from 3 - 10 MWm-3 and neutron wall loading from 2 - 4 MW m-2 which are at the levels expected from the ARIES-RS/AT design studies.