Numerical design of core plasmas for inertial confinement fusion reactors

The design of core plasmas, which is called 'target design', is essential to evaluate whether the ICF reactor does work as a concept. A variety of physics issues mainly based on fluid dynamics of ionized plasmas with strong energy transport by charged particles and photons should be taken into account in the design. A sophisticated fluid code is then required to design targets. The code ILESTA has been used to design high gain targets in the range of laser energy of MJoule. We show a scenario and physics to realize a gain of about 150 with laser energy of 4MJoule. This target design allows a reactor system with several Hz operation, yielding 1GWatt electric power plant. Two dimensional version of the ILESTA code is also used to study a sensitivity of the target design against nonuniformities by laser irradiation and target positioning. (author)