On the EU approach for DEMO architecture exploration and dealing with uncertainties

Abstract

One of the difficulties inherent in designing a future fusion reactor is dealing with uncertainty. As the major step between ITER and the commercial exploitation of nuclear fusion energy, DEMO will have to address many challenges – the natures of which are still not fully known. Unlike fission reactors, fusion reactors suffer from the intrinsic complexity of the tokamak (numerous interdependent system parameters) and from the dependence of plasma physics on scale – prohibiting design exploration founded on incremental progression and small-scale experimentation. For DEMO, this means that significant technical uncertainties will exist for some time to come, and a systems engineering design exploration approach must be developed to explore the reactor architecture when faced with these uncertainties. Important uncertainties in the context of fusion reactor design are discussed and a strategy for dealing with these is presented, treating the uncertainty in the first wall loads as an example.