Study of fueling requirements for the engineering test reactor

An assessment of the fueling requirement for the TIBER Engineering Test Reactor is studied. The neutral shielding pellet ablation model with the inclusion of the effects of the alpha particles is used for our study. The high electron temperature in a reactor-grade plasma makes pellet penetration very difficult. The launch length has to be very large (several tens of meters) in order to avoid pellet breakage due to the low inertial strength of DT ice. The minimum repetition rate corresponding to the largest allowable pellet, is found to be about 1 Hz. A brief survey is done on the various operational and conceptual pellet injection schemes for plasma fueling. The underlying conclusion is that an alternative fueling scheme of coaxial compact-toroid plasma gun is very likely needed for effective central fueling of reactor-grade plasmas