Tailoring Industrial Plant Systems to Support Unique Design Aspects of High-Field Tokamak-Based Fusion Power Plants

In designing a fusion power plant, it may be tempting to entirely outsource more standard industrial systems such as cooling water, HVAC, compressed air, and standard electrical power to allow organizations to focus on direct fusion technology. However, as these systems ultimately support a tokamak fusion plant, they have unique design attributes that need to be taken into consideration. Using the SPARC design as an example, we show the distinctive design aspects of building a power plant around a high-field tokamak. This poster will focus on the top level requirements derived early in the project and how these technical concepts systematically flow to the sub-levels of the plant design. This ensures that the standard plant systems are effectively supporting the overall design functionality of the tokamak over all expected operational modes. Considerations for redundancy, pulsed operations, tritium fuel, electromagnetic field, and radiation environments create constraints on intermittent high-energy systems, actively managing tritium migration throughout the facility, supporting cryogenic facilities with multifaceted failure modes, and managing the distribution of emergency power to a complex facility.