A comparison between the burn condition of deuterium-tritium and deuterium-helium-3 reaction and stability limits

Abstract

The nuclear reaction of deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion by the usual magnetic or inertial confinement suffers from a number of difficulties and problems caused by tritium handling, neutron damage to materials and neutroninduced radioactivity, etc. The study of the nuclear synthesis reaction of deuterium-helium-3 (D-3He) at low collision energies (below 1 keV) is of interest for its applications in nuclear physics and astrophysics. Spherical tokamak (ST) reactors have a low aspect ratio and can confine plasma with ß≈1. These capabilities of ST reactors are due to the use of the alternative D-3He reaction. In this work, the burn condition of D-3He reaction was calculated by using zerodimensional particles and power equations, and, with the use of the parameters of the ST reactor, the stability limit of D-3He reaction was calculated and then the results were compared with those of D-T reaction. The obtained results show that the burn conditions of D-3He reaction required a higher temperature and had a much more limited temperature range in comparison to those of D-T reaction.