SUBJECT: Starlite Conference Call Minutes, Wed 5 April 1995

PARTICIPANTS (by organization): Sze, Billone, Wong, Sager, Herring, Waganer, Bromberg, Steiner, Miller, Najmabadi, Mau, Tillack, El-Guebaly

ADMINISTRATIVE ISSUES

The minutes for the 22 March Conference Call have been distributed.

The May Insulating Coating Materials Workshop, Materials Town Meeting, and Starlite Project Meeting will be held at ANL in Bldg. 208 Conference Room A-138. Non-citizens who wish to attend the Town Meeting and/or the Project Meeting need to contact M. Billone for the advance notification procedure. Blocks of rooms at reduced rates are being held under the name "Fusion Power Program" at the Willowbrook Fairfield Inn and the Lisle Hyatt. The Fairfield Inn (820 W. 79th St., Willowbrook, Il, 708-789-6300) is about 10 minutes by car from ANL. It is holding 20 rooms for May 7-11 at a rate of $43.95 (plus tax) until May 1st. The Hyatt (Lisle, IL, 708-852-1234) is about 25 minutes by car from ANL. It is also holding 20 rooms for May 7-11, but at a rate of $90 (plus tax). Participants are asked to make their own reservations.

Mike Billone has distributed a preliminary Materials Town Meeting agenda. Because of the high interest in the irradiated properties of copper, Mike Billone has volunteered to have a short talk on that subject during the Starlite project meeting.

Claude Reed is preparing an agenda for the Liquid Metals Workshop that also will be distributed to the team. It was suggested that during the Starlite meeting, Rich Mattas present a short summary of the results of the Liquid Metals Workshop and also discuss the progress of the ITER R&D and Design activities, principally in the area of the First Wall, Blanket, and Shield. This would help focus our group on the necessary developmental steps to achieve a credible demo fusion plant that can be built and operated.

G. Hofer is now on the Internet with his own e-mail address .

A reminder to send Ron Miller your abstract for a Starlite/Pulsar paper to be presented at the Fall IEEE conference/symposium (due 1 May).

The next conference call will be on Wednesday, April 19 at 9:30 PST, at 314-232-7776.

Final news on the Japan/U.S. Workshop - C. Wong, L. Waganer, and D.K. Sze submitted brief trip reports to the Engineering Group to convey the significant reactor design discussion points. L. Waganer has collected the list of paper requested and will be distributing them after copying.

Starlite PROJECT STATUS

Task 1 - (Mission/Goals) Lower level systems requirements for the Shield and the PFC systems have been developed and disseminated to the Engineering Group for comment.

L. El-Guebaly and C. Wong described their next level system requirements. Many of the system requirements are founded upon the ARIES or Pulsar designs or are based upon the present ITER requirements. Other system designers are encouraged to continue the effort.

Mark Tillack has generated the initial strawman methodology to determine, allocate, and document system requirements and goals. He found there were generally three classes of system level requirements: 1) generic requirements that would apply equally to all systems (achieve Class C Waste), 2) allocable requirements (reliability, cost), and 3) system specific requirements (self sufficiency). He determined that the most comprehensive accounting system for the allocation framework is to use the Cost Breakdown Structure (CBS) which is derived from the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).

Task 2. - (Economics) R. Miller is continuing to develop the process to correlate and compare the cost of competing energy sources with higher escalating fuels. Ron referenced a Nuclear News Feb 1995 article that quoted a range of $1-$440 to dispose of 1 cu ft of low level waste.

Task 3 - (RAMI) Tom Flynn was reported to be trying to distribute a CREDO report that has some reliability data for liquid metal power plant systems. He has also requested of GA some MTTR and MTBF data on the MHTGR.

Task 4. - (Safety & Licensing) D. Steiner discussed the progress of the zero-th level preliminary hazards analysis being conducted with the assistance of Tom Dunn of GA. The effort to be reported at the next project meeting will include one accident event for both a liquid metal, vanadium system and a helium-cooled, SiC system. The principal goal is to demonstrate the analysis methodology. C. Wong continued that T. Dunn has been working with G. Hofer and C. Wong to develop the strawman that utilizes ARIES II design. F. Najmabadi volunteered to supply the most current version of the ARIES II draft final report.

Task 5A. - (Physics) L. Waganer mentioned that C. Bathke could not be on the telecon, however Bathke had posted the physics LAR strawman on the archives for examination and comment. He noted several numbers will need revision and many engineering problems were raised by this strawman. S. Jardin has a list of those problem areas. T.K. Mau reported the Physics group has commented on a third iteration of the physics Top Level Requirements and he is incorporating the changes into a fourth version to be released shortly. He is also developing a lower level plasma performance values for review by the Physics Group.

The physics aspects of the LAR was discussed. TK was asked if there was a consensus as to the preferred triangularity and there was not. There seem to be two equibrilium regions, one is around 49% beta and the other has the highest bootstrap current around 85%. It was also suggested that we reduce the Demo power level for the LAR to around 500 MW even though the economy of scale may reduce the economic attractiveness.

G. Sager has been talking to T.K. on working out the interrelationship between the plasma and the PFC components. Glenn circulated a draft of the PFC interface parameters to the Physics Group for comment. The goal is to determine a rather independent set of parameters for the PFC components. The benchmark data is based upon Doublet III.

Task 5B - (Engineering) Mark Tillack has issued an outline of the Ferritic Steel Assessment (for Demo) report. Few inputs have been received, thus Mark is to reissue the memo to highlight and possibly reschedule the due date of the inputs. Mark is also working on collecting and distributing the set of LAR engineering issues to be addressed.

L. Bromberg mentioned that he and T. Flynn are addressing design solutions to the magnet out-of-plane loads and the general approach to moving the magnets to improve the maintenance scenario. It was not clear what reactor element would take the out-of-plane loads; the shield, the vacuum, or neither.

The group discussed the need to have a set of design data for irradiated copper to help make solid design decisions regarding the LAR and other high heat flux applications. Since M. Billone had already left the conference call, he was nominated to be the focal point for the collection of these data. Actually, he had previously agreed to present some copper data at the next project meeting.