22nd IAEA Fusion Energy Conference: summary of contributions on Fusion Technology and ITER Activities

Abstract

The contributions to the 22nd IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (FEC) in the categories of Fusion Technology (FT), ITER Activities (IT) and Safety and Economic Studies (SE) are reviewed. In the FT category, 68 papers were submitted, along with 57 papers submitted through the ITER Organisation in the IT category. Finally two papers were submitted in the SE category. The assembled body of work gave a good overview of the worldwide effort in fusion technology and particularly the prolific activity surrounding the ITER Design Review and the major progress with the ITER technology programme.

Experience and technical issues of liquid lithium application as plasma facing material in tokamaks

“…Tritium, ␤ active nuclide with a half-life period of 3.9 × 10 8 s, which is a requisite component of fusion reactor fuel cycle, will be breeded in the lithium systems. The neutron irradiation-induced activity of lithium is practically lacking, since 8 Li, 9 Li and 11 Li radionuclides possess the half-life periods of 0.842, 0.176 and 0.0085 s, respectively [12]. The natural lithium density makes up 0.5316 ± 0.0011 g/cm 3 at 20 • C. The lithium thermal expansion ratio is 47 × 10 −6 K −1 at 25 • C. On melting the lithium volume is increased by 1.5% [12].…”

“…The progress in development of lithium technology and also activity in lithium area in the tokamaks NSTX, CDX-U, HT-7 and LTX, stellarator TJ-II [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] permit of solving the problems on the development of projects of steady-state operating in-vessel lithium components for operative and under construction tokamaks.…”

“…The progress in development of lithium technology allows for deciding the problems in the development of projects of steadystate operating lithium limiters for FTU and lithium divertor for tokamak KTM [9].…”

Initial results from solenoid-free plasma start-up using Transient CHI on QUEST

“…Plasma start-up using microwaves has been confirmed on LATE [3], MAST [4], and QUEST [5,6]. Non-inductive current drive will also be studied in NSTX-U [7,8] and MAST-U [9]. In some of these scenarios the toroidal plasma current evolves through a sequence of non-inductive current ramp phases until it is fully sustained using non-inductive current drive methods.…”