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This Defense Intelligence Agency reference document, dated 10 March 2010, covers inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion. It was produced in FY 2009 under the DIA's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) program. The report focuses on work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and reviews IEC basics, experiments, theory and applications such as neutron sources, explosives detection and space propulsion. It concludes by proposing a breakeven experiment for p-11B fusion that uses a hydrogen plasma simulation.
“BEAMS”43 pages
UNCLASSIFIED/;<F9A: 9FFlil.ltk Wfili 8Hk¥ The proposal is to develop a revolutionary small IEC fusion power unit that could be commercialized in time to impact the energy crisis we now face. This device would have the aggressive goal of burning relatively inexpensive aneutronic p- 11 B fuel, avoiding issues of tritium breeding and radioactivity that the D-T burning ITER type devices face. This breakthrough technology is the result of new understanding of ways to create a deep potential electrostatic 'well' for improved confinement in an ion injected IEC. This will be done with specially designed ion guns to inject ions into the IEC with strong focus and controlled angular momentum. This concept builds on a combination of prior small scale experiments with gun injected IECs and simulation of their scale-up to power production using particle-in-cell (PIC) codes and particle tracking analysis described in earlier sections. The small size of the IEC is a key characteristic. If rapid development is to be achieved, the ability to employ small size experiments is essential. Fortunately, confinement scaling in the IEC is in velocity space (vs. physical space which brings in reducing the surface-to-volume ratio), allowing breakeven and power production in small-volume plasmas. Thus in principle, energy breakeven could be demonstrated in the IEC in a very dense plasma "core" occupying only a few cc volume with only a few l00's of watts in and out. This extreme is not currently possible, but use of the new gun injected technology to obtain breakeven in a dense plasma core in the IEC of l00's of cc volume and with 20-25 kW input power seems practical. This proof-of-principle device would demonstrate the physics of energy production and provide the basis for going rapidly going to practical IEC power plants. This route could lead to power reactors for distributed power applications in the range of a MW that are only a fraction of the size of an ITER Tokamak type plant or even current fission nuclear plants. Small units of this type could be rapidly deployed to allow fusion power to have a real impact on the growing need for energy. Fusion power would then become a vital element in our goal of energy independence. VISION OF A FUTURE P- 11 B FUSION PLANT In the ultimate power plant, the preferred fusion reaction would employ aneutronic p- 11 B fuel, which fuses to produce energetic alpha particles with no neutrons and minimal radioactivity. This eliminates radioactive tritium breeding and corresponding tritium inventory, activation and damage to reactor structural materials and the massive shielding and radiation protection in traditional fission and D-T fusion reactor systems. In this case, p- 11B reactors in the central IEC core result in MeV energy alpha particles according to the reaction: p+ 11 B-----+3a. Due to its inherent non-Maxwellian (beam-like) plasma, the IEC is especially well suited for burning a fuel such as p- 11 B which requires high energies (~150 keV). [See Figure 6.1]. In operation, a bulk of the IEC driving energy is given to ions so an applied voltage of ~180 kV provides ion energies near the peak of the p- 11 B cross section. In contrast, in Maxwellian-type plasmas typical of magnetic confinement devices, energy is expended to create ions over a wide distribution of energies. Thus, Tokomaks are designed to operate at much lower ion energies (~20-30 keV) suitable for D-T fusion. The key physics challenge then for the IEC is to achieve good ion confinement via strong ion trapping (i.e. large number of recirculations) in the potential well. This trapped plasma must meet the Lawson criterion for energy to break-even with p- 11 B, nT ~ 1016 cm- 3- sec (two orders of magnitude above the requirement for D-T fusion). Here n is the ion density and Tis the ion confinement time. Assuming the converged core density in the potential well of 61 UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'Pett errI@ItllL ~:!II!! 8HLV
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 72 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.