Fusion Technology 1992

The aim of the biennial series of symposia on Fusion Technology organized by the European Fusion Laboratories, is the exchange of information on the design, construction and operation of fusion experiments and on the technology being developed for the next-step devices and fusion reactors. The coverage of the volume includes the technological aspects of fusion reactors in relation to new developments, thus forming a guideline for the definition of future work. These proceedings comprise three volumes and contain both the invited lectures and contributed papers presented at the symposium, which was attended by 569 participants from around the globe. The 343 papers, including 12 invited papers, characterise the increasing interest of industry in the fusion programme, giving a broad and current overview on the progress and trends fusion technology is experiencing now, as well as indicating the future for fusion devices.

This paper discusses the following research in fusion technology; Development and technology overview; reactor design studies; RF technology; and plasma facing components.

The use of tritium as a basic fuel material in a thermonuclear fusion reactor raises particular safety issues due to the combined effects of its physico chemical properties and radioactive nature. Furthermore the possibility of attaining further significant progresses in developing and demonstrating the feasibility of tritium burning devices relies on the handling of tritium macroquantities, say ten grammes, in a safe and reliable manner. It is also undoubted that, apart from technological constraints, any validation and exploitation of thermonuclear fusion as a source of energy will be strongly conditioned by the application of stringent operational and environmental safety criteria as it derives from norms of the modern legislation and public acceptance considerations. Even if the safe handling of tritium has already been demonstrated to be feasible on a full fuel cycle scale, it is unanimously recognized that further efforts are still to be concentrated on the improvement of current concepts and development of advanced technologies. Some of the areas requiring substantial additional efforts are plasma exhaust fuel c1ean-up, tritium pellet injection, processing of inert carrier gas, development of large free-oil pumps,tritlUm process analytics, development of large detritiation systems, beryllium-tritium interaction studies, tritium hold-up studies in getter beds, adsorbers and structural materials, tritium recovery from first wall, structural and breeder materials for minimizing tritiated waste arising,tritium storage technology, tritiated waste disposal technolo~y, methodology for routine tritium accountancy,etc . . Most of them are intrinsically related to the safety requirement of tritium technology.