The impact of improved physics on commercial tokamak reactors
Abstract
Improvements in the confinement and beta capability of tokamak devices have long been a goal of the fusion program. We examine the impact of improvements in present day confinement and beta capabilities on commercial tokamak reactors. We characterize confinement with the achievable enhancement factor (H) over the ITER89 Power scaling confinement time, and beta by the Troyon coefficient g. A surprisingly narrow range of plasma confinement and beta are found to be useful in minimizing the cost of electricity for a tokamak reactor. Improvements in only one of these quantities is not useful beyond some point, without accompanying improvements in the other. For the plasma beta limited by a Troyon coefficient (g) near 4.3 (%mT/MA), confinement levels characterized by H factor enhancements of only 2 are useful for our nominal steady-state driven tokamak. These confinement levels are similar to those observed in present day experiments. If the permissible Troyon beta coefficient is near 6, the useful H factor confinement range increases to 2.5, still close to present day confinement levels. Inductively driven, pulsed reactors have somewhat increased useful ranges of confinement, relative to the steady-state cases. For a Troyon beta limit coefficient g near 4.3, H factors up to 2.5 are useful, and for g near 6, H factors up to 3 are useful.
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