Steady State Advanced Tokamak (SSAT): Pre-conceptual design of a superconducting SSAT

摘要

While the SSAT would be built primarily to explore advanced physics regimes in the steady state, doing so will have the added benefit of expanding our tokamak technology base. Key technology developments will be in disruption control; steady state power handling in the divertors, using materials that will survive their incident heat flux levels without serious erosion; low activation material usage to allow access to in-vessel and ex-vessel components during early phases of operation; and in remote maintenance techniques. There will be lesser but important developments in superconducting magnet technology, steady state auxiliary heating systems, steady state fueling and particle removal both from the plasma and from the machine, and in data acquisition and computing systems. These computing systems accommodate very long pulses and must be linked nationally through wide area networks that allow distributed computing, storage, and analysis of the data by the broad fusion community. In this paper the initial configuration and machine design are described. This description is provided at an early stage of pre-conceptual design in order to serve as a reference and to guide future choices and more detailed design work. It does not reflect final thinking in any particular subsystem but does characterize the issues well by presenting some solutions and giving numerical values to calibrate the various solutions, problems, and approaches described herein.