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Developing a commercial production process for 500 000 targets per day: A key challenge for inertial fusion energy
- Source :
- Physics of Plasmas. 13:056305
- Publication Year :
- 2006
- Publisher :
- AIP Publishing, 2006.
-
Abstract
- As is true for current-day commercial power plants, a reliable and economic fuel supply is essential for the viability of future Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) [Energy From Inertial Fusion, edited by W. J. Hogan (International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, 1995)] power plants. While IFE power plants will utilize deuterium-tritium (DT) bred in-house as the fusion fuel, the “target” is the vehicle by which the fuel is delivered to the reaction chamber. Thus the cost of the target becomes a critical issue in regard to fuel cost. Typically six targets per second, or about 500 000∕day are required for a nominal 1000MW(e) power plant. The electricity value within a typical target is about $3, allocating 10% for fuel cost gives only 30 cents per target as-delivered to the chamber center. Complicating this economic goal, the target supply has many significant technical challenges—fabricating the precision fuel-containing capsule, filling it with DT, cooling it to cryogenic temperatures, layering the DT into a uniform layer, characterizing the finished product, accelerating it to high velocity for injection into the chamber, and tracking the target to steer the driver beams to meet it with micron-precision at the chamber center.
Details
- ISSN :
- 10897674 and 1070664X
- Volume :
- 13
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Physics of Plasmas
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........b5343833d57b25f727b3f40bb49a1716
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2177129