29th Symposium on Fusion Technology (SOFT 2016)

P2.192 The consequences of fundamental design choices for DEMO

6 Sep 2016, 14:20

1h 40m

Foyer 2A (2nd floor), 3A (3rd floor) (Prague Congress Centre)

Board: 192

Poster J. Power Plants Safety and Environment, Socio-Economics and Technology Transfer P2 Poster session

Speaker

Richard Kembleton (Culham Centre for Fusion Energy)

Description

There are a number of key design difficulties in producing an integrated demonstration fusion power plant (DEMO) design, and how these issues are resolved fundamentally affects the final overall design. Technological examples include the issue of power loading in the divertor and reducing recirculating power through efficient current drive. Additional drivers include economic considerations such as acceptable capital cost; the target build date of the plant; and whether or not the plant is intended principally as a technology demonstrator for fusion or is a ‘nearly-commercial’ power plant, which can be moved into production with only minor further developments of physics or technology. This contribution explores how the varied approaches to solving these often-competing demands results in very different demonstration power plant concepts from different groups globally, even ones using similar physics and technology models. One of the most important considerations in this analysis is the target build date: a near-term DEMO must use known and well-characterised regimes of operation and technology with a clear development path, rather than speculative concepts and scenarios which might only be attempted in ITER late in its operational phase. This in turn makes the jump from DEMO to a commercial power plant, which must be economically competitive and have high availability, much larger and so places higher demands on DEMO as a development facility. The gap from DEMO to a power plant is also considered.