Abstract
One of the major challenges for development of tokamak reactors is disruptions caused by plasma instabilities, which can give rise to significant generation of runaway electrons [1]. The generation is exponentially sensitive to initial plasma current [2]. For tokamaks of reactor scale with plasma currents of several MAs, a significant fraction of the initial plasma current can be converted into runaways. Due to the lack of an externally driven plasma current and large-scale instabilities, disruptions are not anticipated to be a concern in stellarators. However, there can be significant bootstrap currents, driven by radial pressure gradients, possibly on the order of MAs [3]. The bootstrap current would disappear should the temperature of plasma rapidly drop, for instance due to impurities entering the plasma. However; as the total plasma current cannot change on the same time scale as the plasma temperature, an electric field will be induced to maintain the current. It is possible that the induced electric field could be sufficiently large for runaway electron generation. Thus, runaway electrons could be a concern also for stellarators.
To study if runaway electrons risks being a concern in stellarators, we have implemented a stellarator plasma model in the runaway electron simulation tool DREAM [4]. DREAM is one of the primary tools for studying runaway electrons in tokamaks. By implementing flux surface averaging for stellarator configurations as well as generalizing Ampére’s law to the non-axisymmetric case, we are able to utilize the state-of-the-art runaway electron modelling capabilities of DREAM also for stellarators.
The possibility of runaway electrons in stellarators has been studied, using this stellarator model in DREAM, by scanning over the initial plasma current, temperature decay rate and final equilibrium temperature. The temperature decay rate affects the seed generation, especially through the hot-tail mechanism, while the final equilibrium temperature and the initial plasma current affect the avalanche generation. We find that significant runaway current generation is possible for realistic combinations of parameters, for large initial plasma currents, fast thermal quenches and low final equilibrium temperatures.
**References**
[1] T.C. Hender et al., Nucl. Fusion. 47 S128 (2007).
[2] M.N. Rosenbluth & S.V. Putvinski, Nucl. Fusion 37 1355 (1997).
[3] M. Landreman et al., Phys. Plasmas 29 082501 (2022).
[4] M. Hoppe et al., Comp. Phys. Comm. 268 108098 (2021)