Design Study for the MTF Fusion Demonstration Plant

General Fusion is developing a novel MTF reactor concept where a spherical tokamak target is compressed by a collapsing liquid metal liner. The liquid metal serves multiple purposes as a flux conserver, plasma facing surface, neutron blanket and reactor working fluid for heat extraction. The center column of the liquid metal wall can carry enough current to allow the vessel to act as single turn toroidal field coil.  The liquid liner collapse is driven by a high-pressure pneumatic array, thus using compressed gas to apply hundreds of gigawatts of heating power to the plasma target, at significantly lower cost than conventional auxiliary heating sources.

A large scale integrated demonstration of this concept is currently being designed, and construction is planned at the recently announced General Fusion site at the UKAEA Culham Campus. 

This poster will discuss the design considerations and plasma physics of the concept, and some of the solutions that have been developed for the unique challenges of this machine.

Parameters for the pre-compression target are scaled from General Fusion’s large-scale CHI-formed spherical tokamak experiment Pi3. Results from this machine will also be shared.