MiRACL is partnering with MIT-PSFC to host a summer school on disruption modeling. Find more information here.
Mitigating Risks from Abrupt Confinement Loss (MiRACL) is a Fusion Innovation Research Engine (FIRE) Collaborative funded by the Department of Energy Fusion Energy Sciences program. The mission of MiRACL is to evaluate and manage risks associated with the rapid loss of stored energy in magnetic confinement fusion energy facilities.
The abrupt loss of stored thermal energy and free magnetic energy in a fusion plasma poses significant risks that must be mitigated in the design of any reactor-scale magnetic confinement facility. Magnetically confined fusion plasmas will have hundreds of megajoules of stored thermal energy, and the electrical currents in the plasma needed to support this thermal pressure will total several mega-amperes or more. Rapid loss of this free energy will lead to considerable transient heat loads on plasma-facing components and large forces on surrounding conductors. These risks must be considered at the early stages of the design of any large magnetic fusion facility, and may place severe constraints on the accessible regions of operational space.
MiRACL aims to deliver solutions for this critical problem. The three main objectives are to 1) quantify risks from abrupt confinement loss; 2) evaluate technologies for avoidance and mitigation; and 3) deploy codes, data, and workflows for community use. Meeting these objectives will enable fast virtual scoping and evaluation of innovative methods for mitigation and avoidance techniques, and will help to inform operational limits and risks for given designs. An emphasis will be placed on making direct connections between validated physics tools and engineering models to allow fast and accurate evaluation of actual facility designs, and on documenting and deploying these tools and workflows for community use. To the extent possible, these tools will be open source and general enough to accommodate a variety of concepts. This FIRE Collaborative is intended to serve as a resource to the broader community, providing expertise in physics and modeling capabilities that can assist stakeholders to address critical problems associated with abrupt confinement loss.
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (N. Ferraro)
Columbia University (C. Hansen)
Fiat Lux (V. Izzo)
General Atomics (B. Lyons)
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden (M. Hoppe)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (C. Clauser)
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Y. Ghai)
Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute (J. Merson)
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (D. Curreli)
University of Wisconsin-Madison (R. Jorge)
University of Texas at Austin (J. Varela)