Estimating the fuel ion dilution in fusion plasmas using neutron emission spectrometry

Abstract: Fusion power has the potential to produce clean and safe energy that can contribute significantly to the worlds energy system. The road to this promising energy resource has been long, but with one of the biggest projects in the scientific area that is now on going, a fusion project called ITER, the end of the road is ahead of us. Experiments with a new reactor wall are now in progress at the fusion test reactor JET in Oxford, England.  The experiment is a pre study of a possible reactor wall for the new fusion reactor ITER in Cadarache in Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur, France. The ITER like reactor wall (ILW) contains Beryllium and has theoretically favourable properties for achieving better reactor conditions, compared to the old Carbon based wall (CW). One reason for changing the wall is to decrease the fuel dilution, i.e. amount of particles that the reactor wall contributes to the fusion plasma. This is an important factor to minimize; 1% of fuel dilution with Carbon will cause a loss in power up to 12%, while the corresponding value for Beryllium is 8%. For Deuterium fuelled plasmas at JET, the fuel dilution can be quantified by the ratio of the Deuterium and electron densities, nd/ne. In this work, nd/ne is estimated using data from the neutron emission spectrometer TOFOR, along with measurements of the electron density (ne) and temperature (Te). In this report it is investigated how sensitive these fuel dilution measurements are to uncertainties in the measurements of ne and Te. The fuel dilution measurements changed relatively in a span of 10% to 23% when changing Te and ne with 10% in the fuel dilution model. To determine the differences in fuel dilution between the Carbon and ITER like reactor wall, a comparison has to be made between the old reactor wall and the new ILW. To do this, similar plasma scenarios need to be represented during fusion discharges with both walls. In this report, JET’s database is searched through using different search criteria, in order to enable a fair comparison between the walls. The comparison showed a tendency of lower fuel dilution, i.e. cleaner plasmas, for discharges with the ILW, but the data points are quite scattered and the ILW discharges have, in general, a lower temperature than the CW discharges, which makes the comparison difficult. Therefore, it is too early to definitely tell anything about a possible improvement of the fuel dilution levels after the installation of the ILW.