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In transition: Commercializing fusion power
Commercial fusion power is closer than ever. There are now around 30 U.S. fusion companies, several of which claim to be on track to connect to the grid as early as the 2030s.
Tokamak and laser inertial confinement approaches benefit from decades of research at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and ITER, with alternative concepts including stellarator, magnetic mirror, and Z-pinch confinement also making notable progress as private and government funding for fusion increases.
Teresa S. Bailey, Jim E. Morel, Jae H. Chang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 165 | Number 2 | June 2010 | Pages 149-169
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-66
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a previous paper, Morel and Montry used a Galerkin-based diffusion analysis to define a particular weighted diamond angular discretization for Sn calculations in curvilinear geometries. The weighting factors were chosen to ensure that the Galerkin diffusion approximation was preserved, which eliminated the discrete ordinates flux dip. It was also shown that the step and diamond angular differencing schemes, which both suffer from the flux dip, do not preserve the diffusion approximation in the Galerkin sense. In this paper we re-derive the Morel and Montry weighted diamond scheme using a formal asymptotic diffusion-limit analysis. The asymptotic analysis yields more information than the Galerkin analysis and demonstrates that the step and diamond schemes do in fact formally preserve the diffusion limit to leading order, while the Morel and Montry weighted diamond scheme preserves it to first order, which is required for full consistency in this limit. Nonetheless, the fact that the step and diamond differencing schemes preserve the diffusion limit to leading order suggests that the flux dip should disappear as the diffusion limit is approached for these schemes. Computational results are presented that confirm this conjecture. We further conjecture that preserving the Galerkin diffusion approximation is equivalent to preserving the asymptotic diffusion limit to first order.