Compact Electric Power System for Tokamak

Abstract

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is now implemented with Tokamak which requires about 1 GVar reactive power to compensate its power system for superconducting magnets where about 0.2 GVar is transferred from France Electrical Power Network, the other 0.75 GVar is generated by the system of Reactive Power Compensation and Harmonic Filtering, the Static VAR Compensator (SVC) configuration. ITER can experimentally generate 500 MW fusion thermal power in 400 s long pulse mode with about half of its construction area is for its power suppliers. It could only generate about 500 MW/3=167 MWe active electric power if it is to be configured with pressured water reactor due to that it is only about 1/3 conversion efficiency from thermal energy to electric energy. For such fusion machine, the requirement for reactive power is much larger than the active power it generates. Based on this requirement, one compact pulsed synchronous generator is suggested for this purpose. It can not only generate the fundamental reactive power to compensate and stabilize the power network, but also the active power for putting power on the grid. Due to its two purposes in one device configuration, it becomes cheap and reliable by implement it in the design of future fusion power plant for demonstration. Some consideration has been done to the special synchronous generator, which is intended for the concept design of Chinese Fusion Engineering Testing Reactor, targeting the compact Electric Power System for superconducting Tokamak.