Preliminary design calculations for a field-reversed mirror reactor

The field-reversed-mirror (FRM) is a plasma-confinement scheme that uses the diamagnetic current of the deuterium-tritium (D-T) fuel plasma to convert the open-field pattern of a conventional mirror machine into a closed-field pattern that should have considerably improved plasma-confinement properties. If realized, this improvement in confinement will considerably improve the energy gain of the mirror reactor and will reduce the cost of producing energy. The FRM device is described and compared with earlier field-reversed configurations. The overall energy and particle-balance relations are given and used as bases for preliminary engineering design calculations of the major components of an FRM reactor. We find that the engineering design leads to simple structures (e.g., circular coils, cylindrical vacuum tanks) for which it is easy to make reasonably accurate cost estimates. A cost optimization has been performed; the optimum D-T reactor is found to have a fusion output of 23 MW/cell from a 5-cm radius, 15-cm long plasma in a field of roughly 10 T