Assessment of the potential of magnetohydrodynamic energy conversion for Tokomak reactors

The IN-SITU MHD concept studied in this report is a new proposal to convert the power of a nuclear fusion reactor of the Tokomak type into electricity. In order to determine the feasibility of this concept quasi-one-dimensional calculations of MHD generators working with a Hg-Cs medium have been performed. It has also been studied whether the electron cyclotron radiation emitted by the fusion plasma can be absorbed by the medium in the MHD generator in order to be able to work with enhanced non-equilibrium ionization. It is concluded in this paper that the latter aspect cannot be realized in practice. In order to obtain reasonably compact MHD generators the stagnation pressure at the inlet of the generator should be rather low (< 1.8 bar). Under these circumstances, however, the absorption length which is needed to absorb the cyclotron radiation by the generator medium is excessively large