Extremely intense power exhaust channels are projected for tokamak-based fusion power reactors; a means to handle them remains to be demonstrated. Advanced divertor configurations have been proposed as potential solutions. Recent modelling of tightly baffled, long-legged divertor geometries for the divertor test tokamak concept, ADX, has shown that these concepts may access passively stable, fully detached regimes over a broad range of parameters. The question remains as to how such divertors may perform in a reactor setting. To explore this, numerical simulations are performed with UEDGE for the long-legged divertor geometry proposed for the ARC pilot plant conceptual design—a device with projected heat flux power width ( ) of 0.4 mm and power exhaust of 93 MW—first for a simplified Super-X divertor configuration (SXD) and then for the actual X-point target divertor (XPTD) being proposed. It is found that the SXD, combined with 0.5% fixed-fraction neon impurity concentration, can produce passively stable, detached divertor regimes for power exhausts in the range of 80–108 MW—fully accommodating ARC’s power exhaust. The XPTD configuration is found to reduce the strike-point temperature by a factor of  ∼10 compared to the SXD for small separations (∼1.4 ) between main and divertor X-point magnetic flux surfaces. Even greater potential reductions are identified for reducing separations to  ∼1 or less. The power handling response is found to be insensitive to the level of cross-field convective or diffusive transport assumed in the divertor leg. By raising the separatrix density by a factor of 1.5, stable fully detached divertor solutions are obtained that fully accommodate the ARC exhaust power without impurity seeding. To our knowledge, this is the first time an impurity-free divertor power handling scenario has been obtained in edge modelling for a tokamak fusion power reactor with of 0.4 mm.

Accurate modelling of the thermal transport in the 'scrape-off-layer' (SOL) is of great importance for assessing the divertor exhaust power handling in future high-power tokamak devices. In conditions of low collisionality and/or steep temperature gradients that will be characteristic of such devices, classical local diffusive transport theory breaks down, and the thermal transport becomes nonlocal, depending on conditions in distant regions of the plasma. An advanced nonlocal thermal transport model is implemented into a 1D SOL code 'SD1D' to create 'SD1D-nonlocal', for the study of nonlocal transport in tokamak SOL plasmas. The code is applied to study typical ITER steady-state conditions, to assess the relevance of nonlocality for ITER operating scenarios. Results suggest that nonlocal effects will be present in the ITER SOL, with strong sensitivity in simulation outputs observed for small changes in upstream density conditions, and drastically different temperature profiles predicted using local/nonlocal transport models in some cases. Global flux limiters are shown to be inadequate to capture the spatially and temporally changing SOL conditions. Introducing impurity seeding, under conditions where detached divertor operation is achieved using the flux-limited Spitzer-Härm models used in standard SOL codes, simulations using the nonlocal thermal transport model under equivalent conditions were found to not reach detachment. An analysis of the connection between SOL collisionality and nonlocality suggests that nonlocal effects will be significant for future devices such as DEMO as well. The results motivate further work using nonlocal transport models to study disruption events and low collisionality regimes for ITER, to further improve accuracy of the nonlocal models employed in comparison to kinetic codes, and to identify more appropriate boundary conditions for a nonlocal SOL model.

Numerical modeling of divertor configurations with radially or vertically extended, tightly baffled, outer divertor legs has demonstrated the existence of a passively-stable fully detached divertor regime. In the simulations, long-legged divertors provide up to an order-ofmagnitude increase in peak power handling capability compared to conventional divertors.The key physics for attaining the passively stable, fully detached regime in these simulations involves the interplay of strong convective plasma transport to the divertor leg outer sidewall, confinement of neutral gas in the divertor volume, geometric effects including a secondary X-point, and atomic radiation. New analysis shows that in this regime the detachment front location is set by the balance between the power entering the divertor leg and the losses to the walls of the divertor channel. Correspondingly, the maximum power that can be accommodated by the divertor, while still staying detached, increases with the poloidal length of the leg. The detached regime access window in terms of input power, density and impurity seeding concentration varies quantitatively depending on divertor geometry and modeling assumptions most specifically, cross-field transport to the side walls.

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