Fusion reactor design studies

Report on the Fifth IAEA Technical Committee Meeting and Workshop, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, California, United States of America 13-17 September 1993.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/34/5/414/pdf

Fusion reactor design and technology

An integral experiment on thorium oxide/depleted uranium cylinders with D-T neutrons for 232Th(n, 2n) reaction

A controversy has evolved relative to the multiplication of 14-MeV neutrons in bulk beryllium. On the basis of calculations made using microscopic nuclear data, Powell et. al. predicted that the multiplication in bulk beryllium would improve the efficiency of a tritium breeder. In contradiction to these calculations, experiments by Basu et. al. indicate that the net multiplication is too low for beryllium to be an effective neutron multiplier. On the other hand, the experiment of Wong et. al indicates that multiplication in bulk beryllium may be even higher than predicted from microscopic data. None of the experiments achieved high enough accuracy for the results to be considered definitive. It therefore seemed appropriate to pursue a new investigation of the multiplication in beryllium, using a detector that has adequate isotropy, symmetry, and energy uniformity to allow detection of essentially all of the neutrons produced. Because beryllium is a very efficient moderator, special care is required to ensure that the detector is sensitive to thermal and cold neutrons, and that the matching analysis takes into consideration the effects of upscattering of the thermalized neutrons. The best detector for this purpose is the manganese bath. The beryllium samples were obtained on loan frommore » Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and consist of 26 hemispherical shells having a total weight of {approx}360 lb. A preliminary, uncorrected, value of {approx}2.1 has been obtained from data thus far for a beryllium sample of 19.9 cm radial thickness. This value must be corrected for several systematic effects characteristic of the manganese bath. With the application of preliminary values of the systematic corrections, the current data indicate a new multiplication value of {approx}1.85. 3 refs.« less

Multiplication of 14 MeV neutrons in bulk beryllium

An experiment to measure the multiplication of 14-MeV neutrons in bulk beryllium has been completed. The experiment consisted of determining the ratio of 56Mn activities induced in a large manganes...

S. Suzuki

Papers

A conceptual design study of a reversed field pinch fusion reactor