Disruption Mitigation Technology Concepts and Implications for ITER

Abstract

Disruptions on ITER present challenges to handle the intense heat flux, the large forces from halo currents, and the potential first wall damage from energetic runaway electrons. Injecting large quantities of material into the plasma during the disruption can reduce the plasma energy and increase its resistivity to mitigate these effects. Assessments of the amount of various mixtures and quantities of material required have been made to provide collision mitigation of runaway electron conversion [1] which is the most difficult challenge. The quantities of material required (~0.5 MPa-m3 for deuterium or helium gas) are large enough to have implications on the design and operation of the vacuum system and tokamak exhaust processing system.