The US will contribute 100% towards the pellet injection system for fueling and edge localized mode mitigation.
ITER will require significant fueling capability to operate at high density for long durations. Pellet injection provides efficient core and edge fueling and will deliver hydrogen, deuterium, or a deuterium/tritium mixture as required by plasma operations. Delivering fuel pellets to the plasma edge mitigates edge localized mode instabilities.
For more information, contact: David Rasmussen, US ITER Project Office Fueling Team Leader, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, rasmussnda@ornl.gov | 865-574-1158
The I&C team has completed a number of design achievements in preparation of First Plasma deliveries, including: Ion Cyclotron Heating (RF Bldg.) I&C First Plasma Final Design Review (December 2017), Tokamak Cooling Water System I&C First Plasma Final Design Review (November 2017), Vacuum Auxiliary System (03) Conceptual Design Review (July 2017) and Roughing Pumps System I&C Conceptual Design Review (April 2017).
ITER will require significant fuelling capability to operate at high density for long durations. Pellet injection provides efficient core and edge fuelling of deuterium or a deuterium/tritium mixture; the system will also deliver deuterium pellets to the plasma edge to mitigate edge localized mode instabilities (ELMs). The US ITER pellet injection team based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has designed and fabricated a new dual nozzle test article that will support both fuelling pellets and ELM pacing pellets in the ITER Tokamak.
Source: ITER Newsline
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a continuous extruder for fusion fuel and are advancing state-of-the-art fueling and plasma control for the ITER international fusion reactor now under construction in France.
US ITER researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are developing advanced processes to assess ITER’s unique tokamak components and materials in the presence of the tremendous amount of neutron flux and energy released by fusion reactions. The process, called neutronics analysis, involves a palette of complex computational codes and libraries for predicting neutron impacts.
Using a cryogenic deuterium pellet injector installed on the DIII-D tokamak operated for the Department of Energy Office of Science by General Atomics in San Diego, ORNL researchers and collaborators were able to fire millimeter-sized frozen deuterium pellets into ultra-hot plasma at a rate of 60 times per second.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Fusion Pellet Fueling Lab has been at the center of design and testing of plasma fueling systems for tokamak research applications for decades. Since the mid-1970s, lab researchers have been designing, testing, and contributing hardware for fusion magnetic confinement experiments here in the United States and around the world. As the US ITER project moves from design and testing of components to manufacturing, the lab is making prototypes for the ITER tokamak.
