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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Wilfred Anthony Cooper, Sergi Ferrando i Margalet, Simon J. Allfrey, Johann Kißlinger, Horst F. G. Wobig, Yoshiro Narushima, Shoichi Okamura, Chihiro Suzuki, Kiyomasa Y. Watanabe, Kozo Yamazaki, Maxim Yu. Isaev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 2 | September 2004 | Pages 365-377
Technical Papers | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A576
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The impact of the bootstrap current is investigated on the equilibrium properties of a two-period quasi-axisymmetric stellarator reactor with free boundary and on the corresponding ideal magnetohydrodynamic stability properties. Although the magnetic field strength B spectrum is dominated by a m/n = 1/0 component, the discrete filamentary coils trigger some small-amplitude symmetry-breaking components that can disturb the quasi-symmetry of B. Finite causes the plasma column to shift outward in the absence of bootstrap current. With a self-consistent bootstrap current in the 1/ regime, the plasma becomes more elongated and more distorted in the horizontally elongated up-down symmetric cross section. At [approximately equal to] 3.25%, the plasma can be restored to its near-vacuum shape with the application of a vertical field with coil currents 20% of those of the modular coils, but at the expense of a significant mirror component in the B-field spectrum. The bootstrap current causes the rotational transform profile to increase above the critical resonant value (c = 1/2 for 1.1%) and combines with the Pfirsch-Schlüter current to destabilize a m/n = 2/1 external kink mode for 1.8%.