Inertial Confinement Fusion with a Heavy-Ion Driver-Accelerator and a Cylindrical Target

An economically efficient power plant burning deuterium-tritium fuel can be built using a powerful heavy-ion accelerator of a new type. A multilinear cryogenic cylindrical target, 1 cm long, 0.44 cm in radius, and containing ∼7.8 mg equimolar DT fuel, is studied as an example. The driver-accelerator gives two different target irradiation regimes. In both regimes, the beams consist of platinum ions, accelerated up to 100 GeV, with different isotopic composition, charged in the first regime only positively and in the second regime positively and negatively. In the first regime, the beam energy is 4.8 MJ and the beam heats in 60 nsec only the target shell. High heating symmetry is achieved by rapidly rotating the beam around the target axis with frequency ∼1 GHz. The fuel is compressed into a dense filament, where the condition for propagation of a fusion burn wave is satisfied – ρR ≥ 0.4 g/cm2. In the second regime, a beam with 0.4 MJ ions heats in 0.2 nsec compressed fuel with power density 2.5·107 TW/cm2 up to ignition temperature. The computed energy amplification factor in the target is ≥200.