Startup Scenarios of an Advanced Fuel Tokamak: First Wall and Shield Thermal Response

Three different startup scenarios, one using pure D-³He, one using pure D-T to assist reaching the D-³He operating point, and one using a mixture of D-T-³He, have been analyzed, for the startup of ARIES-III. ARIES-III is a conceptual D-³He tokamak fusion power reactor operating in a second stability configuration. The process of starting the plasma up and bringing it to the desired operating point has been optimized to minimize the need for auxiliary ICRF heating during startup. In the second and third startup scenarios, seeding the plasma with tritium during startup reduces the amount of ICRF power required, but leads to a 14 MeV neutron pulse. Neutronics calculations have been performed to generate the nuclear heating profiles in the first wall and shield. The neutronics results were scaled with the neutron power to determine the nuclear heating profiles at different times during the startup phase. In this work, a two-dimensional transient thermal analysis is performed for the startup phases and the temperature distribution in the first wall and shield as a function of time is presented. The analysis is performed for the worst conditions at the midplane of the outboard region.