Reactor de testare

de fuziune Tokamak

Reactorul de testare de fuziune Tokamak

( TFTR ) a fost un tokamak experimental
construit la Princeton Plasma Physics
Laboratory (PPPL) în jurul anului 1980 și
a intrat în funcțiune în 1982. TFTR a fost
proiectat cu scopul explicit de a atinge
pragul de rentabilitate științific , punctul
în care căldura fiind eliberată din reacțiile
de fuziune din plasmă este egală sau mai
mare decât încălzirea furnizată plasmei
de dispozitive externe pentru încălzirea
acesteia. [1] [2]
 TFTR
Reactor de testare de fuziune Tokamak

TFTR în 1989

Tip de dispozitiv Tokamak

Locație Princeton , New

Jersey , SUA

Afiliere Laboratorul de fizică

a plasmei Princeton

Specificatii tehnice

Raza majoră 2,52 m (8 ft 3 in)

Raza mica 0,87 m (2 ft 10 in)

Camp magnetic 6,0 T (60.000 G)
(toroidal)

Putere de incalzire 51 MW

Curentul plasmatic 3 MA

Istorie

An(ani) de 1982–1997
funcționare

Precedat de Princeton Large

Torus (PLT)

urmat de Experimentul
National Spherical
Torus (NSTX)

Dispozitive înrudite JT-60

TFTR nu a atins niciodată acest obiectiv,

dar a produs progrese majore în ceea ce
privește timpul de izolare și densitatea
energiei. A fost primul dispozitiv de
fuziune magnetică din lume care a
efectuat experimente științifice extinse
cu plasme compuse din deuteriu/tritiu
(DT) 50/50, amestecul de combustibil
necesar pentru producerea practică a
energiei de fuziune și, de asemenea,
primul care a produs mai mult de 10 MW
de putere de fuziune. . A stabilit mai
multe recorduri pentru puterea de ieșire,
temperatura maximă și produsul triplu de
fuziune .

TFTR a fost închis în 1997, după

cincisprezece ani de funcționare. PPPL a
folosit cunoștințele de la TFTR pentru a
începe să studieze o altă abordare,
tokamak-ul sferic , în cadrul National
Spherical Torus Experiment . JT-60
japonez este foarte asemănător cu TFTR,
ambele urmărind designul lor după
inovațiile cheie introduse de Shoichi
Yoshikawa (1934-2010) [3] în timpul
perioadei sale la PPPL în anii 1970.

General
În fuziunea nucleară, există două tipuri
de reactoare suficient de stabile pentru a
conduce fuziunea: reactoare de izolare
magnetică și reactoare de izolare
inerțială. Prima metodă de fuziune
urmărește să prelungească timpul pe
care ionii îl petrec apropiați pentru ai
fuziona împreună, în timp ce a doua are
ca scop fuzionarea ionilor atât de repede
încât să nu aibă timp să se depărteze.
Reactoarele de izolare inerțială, spre
deosebire de reactoarele de izolare
magnetică, utilizează fuziunea laser și
fuziunea cu fascicul ionic pentru a realiza
fuziunea. Cu toate acestea, cu
reactoarele de izolare magnetică eviți
problema de a fi nevoit să găsești un
material care să reziste la temperaturile
ridicate ale reacțiilor de fuziune nucleară.
Curentul de încălzire este indus de
câmpurile magnetice în schimbare din
bobinele centrale de inducție și
depășește un milion de amperi.[4]
Istorie

Tokamak

La începutul anilor 1960, domeniul

energiei de fuziune a crescut suficient de
mare încât cercetătorii au început să
organizeze întâlniri semestriale care s-au
rotit în jurul diferitelor unități de
cercetare. În 1968, reuniunea anuală a
avut loc la Novosibirsk , unde delegația
sovietică a surprins pe toată lumea
susținând că modelele lor de tokamak au
atins niveluri de performanță cu cel puțin
un ordin de mărime mai bune decât orice
alt dispozitiv. Afirmațiile au fost inițial
întâmpinate cu scepticism, dar când
rezultatele au fost confirmate de o
echipă din Marea Britanie în anul
următor, acest avans uriaș a dus la o
„buchetă virtuală” a construcției de
tokamak. [5]

In the US, one of the major approaches

being studied up to this point was the
stellarator, whose development was
limited almost entirely to the PPPL. Their
latest design, the Model C, had recently
gone into operation and demonstrated
performance well below theoretical
calculations, far from useful figures. With
the confirmation of the Novosibirsk
results, they immediately began
converting the Model C to a tokamak
layout, known as the Symmetrical
Tokamak (ST). This was completed in the
short time of only eight months, entering
service in May 1970. ST's computerized
diagnostics allowed it to quickly match
the Soviet results, and from that point,
the entire fusion world was increasingly
focused on this design over any other.[6]

Princeton Large Torus

During the early 1970s, Shoichi

Yoshikawa was looking over the tokamak
concept. He noted that as the size of the
reactor's minor axis (the diameter of the
tube) increased compared to its major
axis (the diameter of the entire system)
the system became more efficient. An
added benefit was that as the minor axis
increased, confinement time improved
for the simple reason that it took longer
for the fuel ions to reach the outside of
the reactor. This led to widespread
acceptance that designs with lower
aspect ratios were a key advance over
earlier models.[2]

This led to the Princeton Large Torus

(PLT), which was completed in 1975. This
system was successful to the point
where it quickly reached the limits of its
Ohmic heating system, the system that
passed current through the plasma to
heat it. Among the many ideas proposed
for further heating, in cooperation with
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, PPPL
developed the idea of neutral beam
injection. This used small particle
accelerators to inject fuel atoms directly
into the plasma, both heating it and
providing fresh fuel.[2]

After a number of modifications to the

beam injection system, the newly
equipped PLT began setting records and
eventually made several test runs at
60 million K, more than enough for a
fusion reactor. To reach the Lawson
criterion for ignition, all that was needed
was higher plasma density, and there
seemed to be no reason this would not
be possible in a larger machine. There
was widespread belief that break-even
would be reached during the 1970s.[6][2]

TFTR concept

Inside the TFTR plasma vessel

After the success of PLT and other

follow-on designs, the basic concept was
considered well understood. PPPL began
the design of a much larger successor to
PLT that would demonstrate plasma
burning in pulsed operation.[2]
In July 1974, the Department of Energy
(DOE) held a large meeting that was
attended by all the major fusion labs.
Notable among the attendees was
Marshall Rosenbluth, a theorist who had
a habit of studying machines and finding
a variety of new instabilities that would
ruin confinement. To everyone's surprise,
at this meeting he failed to raise any new
concerns. It appeared that the path to
break-even was clear.[7]

The last step before the attack on break-

even would be to make a reactor that ran
on a mixture of deuterium and tritium, as
opposed to earlier machines which ran
on deuterium alone. This was because
tritium was both radioactive and easily
absorbed in the body, presenting safety
issues that made it expensive to use. It
was widely believed that the
performance of a machine running on
deuterium alone would be basically
identical to one running on D-T, but this
assumption needed to be tested. Looking
over the designs presented at the
meeting, the DOE team chose the
Princeton design.[7]

Bob Hirsch, who recently took over the

DOE steering committee, wanted to build
the test machine at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory (ORNL), but others in the
department convinced him it would make
more sense to do so at PPPL. They
argued that a Princeton team would be
more involved than an ORNL team
running someone else's design. If an
engineering prototype of a commercial
system followed, that could be built at
Oak Ridge. They gave the project the
name TFTR and went to Congress for
funding, which was granted in January
1975. Conceptual design work was
carried out throughout 1975, and detailed
design began the next year.[7]

TFTR would be the largest tokamak in

the world; for comparison, the original ST
had a plasma diameter of 12 inches
(300 mm), while the follow-on PLT design
was 36 inches (910 mm), and the TFTR
was designed to be 86 inches
(2,200 mm).[2] This made it roughly
double the size of other large-scale
machines of the era; the 1978 Joint
European Torus and roughly concurrent
JT-60 were both about half the
diameter.[8]

As PLT continued to generate better and

better results, in 1978 and 79, additional
funding was added and the design
amended to reach the long-sought goal
of "scientific breakeven" when the
amount of power produced by the fusion
reactions in the plasma was equal to the
amount of power being fed into it to heat
it to operating temperatures. Also known
as Q = 1, this is an important step on the
road to useful power-producing
designs.[9] To meet this requirement, the
heating system was upgraded to 50 MW,
and finally to 80 MW.[10]

Operations

Construction began in 1980 and TFTR

began initial operations in 1982. A
lengthy period of break-in and testing
followed. By the mid-1980s, tests with
deuterium began in earnest in order to
understand its performance. In 1986 it
produced the first 'supershots' which
produced many fusion neutrons.[11]
These demonstrated that the system
could reach the goals of the initial 1976
design; the performance when running
on deuterium was such that if tritium
was introduced it was expected to
produce about 3.5 MW of fusion power.
Given the energy in the heating systems,
this represented a Q of about 0.2, or
about only 20% of the requirement for
break-even.[9]

Further testing revealed significant

problems, however. To reach break-even,
the system would have to meet several
goals at the same time, a combination of
temperature, density and the length of
time the fuel is confined. In April 1986,
TFTR experiments demonstrated the last
two of these requirements when it
produced a fusion triple product of 1.5 x
1014 Kelvin seconds per cubic
centimeter, which is close to the goal for
a practical reactor and five to seven
times what is needed for breakeven.
However, this occurred at a temperature
that was far below what would be
required. In July 1986, TFTR achieved a
plasma temperature of 200 million kelvin
(200 MK), at that time the highest ever
reached in a laboratory. The temperature
is 10 times greater than the center of the
sun, and more than enough for
breakeven. Unfortunately, to reach these
temperatures the triple product had been
greatly reduced to 1013, two or three
times too small for break-even.

Major efforts to reach these conditions

simultaneously continued. Donald Grove,
TFTR project manager, said they
expected to achieve that goal in 1987.
This would be followed with D-T tests
that would actually produce breakeven,
beginning in 1989.[12] Unfortunately, the
system was unable to meet any of these
goals. The reasons for these problems
were intensively studied over the
following years, leading to a new
understanding of the instabilities of high-
performance plasmas that had not been
seen in smaller machines. A major
outcome of TFTR's troubles was the
development of highly non-uniform
plasma cross-sections, notably the D-
shaped plasmas that now dominate the
field.

Later experiments

Although it became clear that TFTR

would not reach break-even, experiments
using tritium began in earnest in
December 1993, the first such device to
move primarily to this fuel. In 1994 it
produced a then world-record of 10.7
megawatts of fusion power from a 50-50
D-T plasma (exceeded at JET in the UK,
which generated 16MW from 24MW of
injected thermal power input in 1997).
The two experiments had emphasized
the alpha particles produced in the
deuterium-tritium reactions, which are
important for self-heating of the plasma
and an important part of any operational
design. In 1995, TFTR attained a world-
record temperature of 510 million °C -
more than 25 times that at the center of
the sun. This later was beaten the
following year by the JT-60 Tokamak
which achieved an ion temperature of
522 million °C (45 keV).[13] De asemenea,
în 1995, oamenii de știință TFTR au
explorat un nou mod fundamental de
izolare a plasmei - forfecare inversată
îmbunătățită , pentru a reduce turbulența
plasmei. [14]

TFTR a rămas în funcțiune până în 1997.

A fost demontat în septembrie 2002,
după 15 ani de funcționare. [15]

A fost urmat de tokamak sferic NSTX .

[16]

Vezi si
Portalul
tehnologiei
nucleare

Lista experimentelor de fuziune

Referințe
1. Meade, Dale (September 1988). "Results
and Plans for the Tokamak Fusion Test
 Reactor". Journal of Fusion Energy. 7 (2–
3): 107. Bibcode:1988JFuE....7..107M (htt
ps://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1988JFu
E....7..107M) . doi:10.1007/BF01054629
(https://doi.org/10.1007%2FBF0105462
9) . S2CID 120135196 (https://api.semant
icscholar.org/CorpusID:120135196) .
2. "Princeton tokamak heats up the race for
fusion power" (https://books.google.com/
books?id=AAEAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA71) .
Popular Science. December 1978. pp. 69–
71, 150.
3. A Celebration of the Life and Work of
Shoichi Yoshikawa, April 9, 1934–
November 4, 2010 (https://nstx.pppl.gov/
DragNDrop/NSTX_Meetings/Team_Meeti
ngs/2011/2011_10_19/Condolences%20f
or%20Prof%20Shoichi%20Yoshikawa.pd
f) (PDF). NSTX-U.
4. Magnetic Confinement Fusion, & TFTR (ht
tp://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbas
e/nucene/fusmag.html)
5. Thomson, George (30 January 1958).
"Thermonuclear Fusion: The Task and the
Triumph" (https://books.google.com/book
s?id=lYou4nC43PUC&pg=PA11) . New
Scientist. Vol. 3, no. 63. pp. 11–13.
6. Chase, Laurence (8 December 1970).
"Major Advances in Cancer Research and
at Forrestal" (https://books.google.com/b
ooks?id=NxlbAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA11
1) . p. 19.
7. Dean, Stephen (2013). Search for the
Ultimate Energy Source (https://books.go
ogle.com/books?id=KSA_AAAAQBAJ&pg
=PA44) . Springer. p. 44.
ISBN 9781461460374.
8. Kubiˇc, Martin (31 July 2007). Review of
plasma parameters of the JET tokamak in
various regimes of its operation (https://p
hysics.fjfi.cvut.cz/publications/FTTF/BP_
Martin_Kubic.pdf) (PDF) (Technical
report). Czech Technical University.
9. Meade 1988, p. 107.
10. K. W. Ehlers, K. H. Berkner, W. S. Cooper,
B. Hooper, R. V. Pyle, J. W. Stearns (17
November 1975). Conceptual Design of a
Neutral-Beam Injection System for the
TFTR (http://www.iaea.org/inis/collectio
n/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/07/243/72
43157.pdf) (PDF) (Technical report).
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
11. Fusion. Robin Herman. 1990. ISBN 0-521-
38373-0
12. Thomsen, D.E.(1986) A Plasma 10 times
as hot as the Sun. Science News. 130:
102-102. ISSN 0036-8423 (https://www.w
orldcat.org/search?fq=x0:jrnl&q=n2:0036-
8423)
13. "Plasma physics found in JT-60 tokamak
over the last 20 years" (https://jopss.jaea.
go.jp/search/servlet/search?5017810&la
nguage=1) .
14. "Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor" (http://ww
w.pppl.gov/Tokamak%20Fusion%20Test%
20Reactor) .
15. „Înlăturarea reactorului de testare a
fuziunii Tokamak de la Princeton
University a fost finalizată cu succes” (htt
ps://web.archive.org/web/201304231701
27/http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/
archive/S01/16/32S00/index.xml) .
www.princeton.edu . Arhivat din original
(http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/ar
chive/S01/16/32S00/index.xml#top) pe
23.04.2013. (https://web.archive.org/we
b/20130423170127/http://www.princeto
n.edu/main/news/archive/S01/16/32S0
0/index.xml) (http://www.princeton.edu/
main/news/archive/S01/16/32S00/index.
xml#top)
 16. http://www.pppl.gov/Tokamak%20Fusion
%20Test%20Reactor ("Pe lângă
îndeplinirea obiectivelor sale de fizică,
TFTR și-a atins toate obiectivele de
proiectare hardware")

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