ARIES-AT maintenance system definition and analysis

A fusion power plant must have a high availability to be competitive in the electrical generation market. Attaining high plant availability is difficult because the fusion power core has a limited service lifetime. Moreover, the core components are radioactive and very large. To assess these issues, the maintainability of the ARIES fusion power core is analyzed and integrated into the early power core design process, which results in a maintainability approach capable of attaining a relatively short refurbishment time. The developed timelines are presented for the scheduled maintenance of the power core. The short core refurbishment time coupled, with evolutionary improvements in the maintainability of the reactor plant equipment and the balance-of-plant equipment, infer an attractive plant availability in the range of 90%.