Lecture

Heating, Burning Plasmas, ITER and Route to Fusion Power Plant

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In course

PHYS-424: Plasma II

This course completes the knowledge in plasma physics that students have acquired in the previous two courses, with a discussion of different applications, in the fields of magnetic confinement and controlled fusion, astrophysical and space plasmas, and so ...

Description

This lecture covers the concepts of heating and burning plasmas, focusing on the ITER project and the path towards a fusion power plant. It discusses various methods of plasma heating, such as neutral beam injection and electromagnetic waves, along with the challenges and advantages of each method. The lecture also delves into the specifics of tritium, its production, and the importance of tritium self-sufficiency in fusion reactors. Additionally, it explores the design goals of ITER, the construction progress, and the future prospects beyond ITER with the DEMO project.

Instructor

Holger Reimerdes

Teaching & PhD PhD Students Martim Zurita, Marta Pedrini, Benjamin Yong Kwak Brown, Pierre Louis Sintre, Massimo Carpita, Richard Alexander David Ducker, Giuseppe Iunior Drago Past EPFL PhD Students Mirko Wensing, Claudia Colandrea, Guang-Yu Sun Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Gustavo Paganini Canal, Joyeeta Sinha, Roberto Maurizio Courses Control and Operation of Tokamaks PHYS-748 This course treats the main issues in operation and control of a tokamak. Control-oriented models are de

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Physics

Plasma physics: Fusion power

Related concepts (32)

Plasma (physics)

Plasma () is one of four fundamental states of matter, characterized by the presence of a significant portion of charged particles in any combination of ions or electrons. It is the most abundant form of ordinary matter in the universe, being mostly associated with stars, including the Sun. Extending to the rarefied intracluster medium and possibly to intergalactic regions, plasma can be artificially generated by heating a neutral gas or subjecting it to a strong electromagnetic field.

Burning plasma

In plasma physics, a burning plasma is one in which most of the heating comes from fusion reactions involving thermal plasma ions. The Sun and similar stars are a burning plasma, and in 2020 the National Ignition Facility achieved burning plasma. A closely related concept is that of an ignited plasma, in which all of the heating comes from fusion reactions. Sun In the Sun and other similar stars, those fusion reactions involve hydrogen ions.

Tokamak

A tokamak (ˈtoʊkəmæk; токамáк) is a device which uses a powerful magnetic field to confine plasma in the shape of a torus. The tokamak is one of several types of magnetic confinement devices being developed to produce controlled thermonuclear fusion power. , it was the leading candidate for a practical fusion reactor. Tokamaks were initially conceptualized in the 1950s by Soviet physicists Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov, inspired by a letter by Oleg Lavrentiev. The first working tokamak was attributed to the work of Natan Yavlinsky on the T-1 in 1958.

Plasma stability

The stability of a plasma is an important consideration in the study of plasma physics. When a system containing a plasma is at equilibrium, it is possible for certain parts of the plasma to be disturbed by small perturbative forces acting on it. The stability of the system determines if the perturbations will grow, oscillate, or be damped out. In many cases, a plasma can be treated as a fluid and its stability analyzed with magnetohydrodynamics (MHD).

Nuclear fusion–fission hybrid

Hybrid nuclear fusion–fission (hybrid nuclear power) is a proposed means of generating power by use of a combination of nuclear fusion and fission processes. The basic idea is to use high-energy fast neutrons from a fusion reactor to trigger fission in non-fissile fuels like U-238 or Th-232. Each neutron can trigger several fission events, multiplying the energy released by each fusion reaction hundreds of times. As the fission fuel is not fissile, there is no self-sustaining chain reaction from fission.

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