An Assessment of Alternative Divertors for the European DEMO

The scale of DEMO, in terms of size, power and complexity, poses unique challenges to exhaust physics. The large energy reservoir requires care in designing exhaust systems, especially in the presence of the large uncertainties that still remain in the physics and in the controllability of the transients. It is not clear the ITER solution will extrapolate to DEMO, hence building margin is essential. EUROfusion's WP/DTT1/ADC project was aimed at investigating the benefits and complexities associated with alternative divertor configurations, as a potential mitigation strategy. The project addressed both physics and engineering assessments in a synergetic way (see figure on the left for an example of the activities). We investigated Snowflake, (SFD) Super-X (SXD) and X- (XD) divertors and compared them with the baseline single null (SND).