Berlin 2015 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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VA: Fachverband Vakuumphysik und Vakuumtechnik

VA 1: Vacuum systems and tools

VA 1.1: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 16. März 2015, 10:00–10:40, HFT-FT 131

Vacuum Pumping of Fusion Reactors: The KALPUREX-Process — •Thomas Giegerich and Christian Day — Institute for Technical Physics (ITEP), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Campus Nord, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, D-76344, GERMANY

Activities are ongoing in Europe to build the first fusion power plant. Here, the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium are merged together to helium under the release of huge amounts of energy. The fusion reaction takes place in a plasma contained in vacuum. This asks for a very large vacuum chamber and a powerful vacuum pumping system that is able to pump the reactor down and to keep the vacuum against a fuelling gas flow during the several hours long plasma pulses. Up to now, no economic feasible vacuum pumping solution is available that is able to provide the required pumping speed (some 100.000 l/s) for the radioactive and chemically very active tritium. At KIT, a vacuum pumping process for DEMO is currently under development. This process uses mercury as tritium compatible working fluid and is called KALPUREX process (Karlsruhe liquid metal based pumping process for fusion reactor exhaust gases). Main advantage of this process are the short processing times and the low total inventories for the tritiated exhaust gases which ensures that the regulatory safety limits are reliably met. This talk gives an overview on fusion and on the European EUROfusion programme with the ultimate goal to provide electricity to the grid in the early 2050s. It presents the full KALPUREX process incl. all planned and ongoing validation activities in the field of vacuum pumping.