J. Foster H. Lux
Estimating costs of prototype or demonstration fusion power plants is difficult enough due to the often still preliminary designs combined with a non-existing supply chain for many bespoke technologies or materials. Extrapolating to commercial fusion power plants without a clear design is even harder and uncertainties are large. As a result, for…
PurchaseA. Quadling D. Bowden C. Hardie A. Vasanthakumaran
The STEP environment will include magnetic, thermal, mechanical and environmental loads far greater than those seen in the Joint European Torus campaigns of the past decade or currently contemplated for ITER. Greater still are the neutron peak dose rates of 10-6displacements per atom, per second, which in-vessel materials in STEP are …
PreprintH Meyer the STEP Team
The programme to design plasma scenarios for the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP), a reactor concept aiming at net electricity production, seeks to exploit the inherent advantages of the spherical tokamak (ST) while making conservative assumptions about plasma performance. This approach is motivated by the large gap between present-da…
PreprintNousheen Nawal Hanni Lux Member IEEE Rhian Chapman James R. Cowan Member APM
Being a novel technology, estimating costs for fusion power plants comes with large uncertainties. Cost uncertainties in prototypes arise from various sources and reduce with programme maturity (including the selection of a site), technical and design maturity, maturity of the commercial strategy (e.g., make vs. buy decisions, partnering de…
PreprintP Methven
This paper sets the context for those that follow in this Special Edition by describing why STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) has been launched, what it aims to achieve (benefits) and, principally, how the whole programme will be delivered (strategy). The paper draws on work on major project delivery and organisation design and ap…
PreprintS. Chen N. Correa Villanueva S. Kirk S. Capp O. Fordham A. Reeves S. Jones R. Khan A. Sergi C. Thompson
During development of the UKAEA’S Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP), assessment of manufacturing strategies for the inboard shield identified several gaps in knowledge. Limits arose from the modularization of this component, geometric constraints of tungsten ceramic forming, joining with low-activation interlayers and dissimilar j…
PreprintR. W. Eardley A. J. Dubas A. Davis
While substantial research effort has been made recently in the development of computational liquid-metal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) solvers, this has typically been confined to closed-source and commercial codes. This work aimed to investigate some open-source alternatives. Two OpenFOAM-based MHD solvers, mhdFoam and epotFoam, were found to sho…
PreprintM. Giacomin D. Kennedy C. J. Ajay D. Dickinson B. S. Patel C. M. Roach
In this work, we present the results of first-of-their-kind nonlinear local gyrokinetic simulations of electromagnetic turbulence at mid-radius in the burning plasma phase of the conceptual high-β, reactor-scale, tight-aspect-ratio tokamak STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production). A prior linear analysis in D.Kennedy et al. submitted to Nucl…
PreprintD. Kennedy M. Giacomin B. S. Patel W. A. Hornsby D. Dickinson C. M. Roach
We present herein the results of a linear gyrokinetic analysis of electromagnetic microinstabilites in the conceptual high−β, reactor-scale, tight-aspect-ratio tokamak STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, https://step.ukaea.uk). We examine a range of flux surfaces between the deep core and the pedestal top for the two candidate flat…
Preprint Published