Illustrative future fusion-fission hybrid reactor designs

Abstract

There have been a number of scoping "designs," at various levels of detail, of fusion-fission hybrid (FFH) reactors published in the literature over the years. Many of these have been individual design studies, but there have been at least two collected sets of studies of particular reactor types for different FFH missions. We will illustrate the genre (1) with a discussion of the recent substantial Georgia Tech subcritical advanced burner reactor (SABR) (TRU burner) [12,25] and SABrR (Pu breeder) [48] tokamak reactor FFH design studies and (2) with a brief summary of an earlier, but recently updated, comprehensive series [10,13] of magnetic mirror FFH studies from a few years back. The tokamak is the leading fusion reactor concept in terms of achieved performance, level of development, and level of effort world-wide, while the magnetic mirror is probably the geometrically simplest magnetic fusion reactor concept, which encountered particle and energy confinement problems several years ago, but has more recently achieved more encouraging confinement results.