The Princeton reference design fusion power plant

The Princeton Reference Design Fusion Power Plant is an electrical generating station based upon a large tokamak confining a D-T plasma. The plasma major and minor radii are nominally 10.5 m by 3.2 m; the toroidal field at the centre-line is 6 T. With a mean ion temperature of 30 keV, an average β of 0.04, and an average tau of 3.83 s a fusion power of 3440 MW is achieved during 97 minutes of the 100 minute long-pulse cycle. The plasma throughput of 2.8x1022 ions/s is deflected down a divertor channel where it cools by radiation and is neutralized, exhausting as hot gas to the vacuum pumps. The total thermal power of 5305 MW is carried by a helium coolant to a conventional steam cycle producing 2030 MW(e) net. Tritium is bred in an 80-cm thick blanket of eutectic flibe (53.1% beryllium fluoride and 46.9% lithium fluoride) with Nimonic PE-16 (43% nickel, 39% iron, 18% chromium) as the structural material; the blanket-averaged volume fractions are 69.8% flibe, 9.4% PE-16, and 20.8% helium. The breeding ratio of 1.04 will allow doubling of the 2.57 kg inventory in 121 days. The nominal wall load of 1.76 MW of DT neutrons per m2 implies a total flux of 8.65x1018n.m-2.s-1 at the wall and a corresponding helium production rate of 275 ppm/year. (author)