Revisiting confinement scalings and fusion performance with a perspective optimized for extrapolation

TL;DR

This paper reevaluates confinement scalings and fusion performance projections for tokamaks, emphasizing the importance of plasma current and high-field devices with metal walls for future reactor design.

Contribution

It introduces a minimally complex, extrapolation-optimized empirical confinement scaling and analyzes its implications for fusion power and reactor performance.

Findings

Confinement scaling optimally depends on plasma current, machine size, heating power, and elongation.

Fusion triple product scales approximately as the square of plasma current.

High-performance reactors may require plasma currents exceeding 20 MA, especially with metal walls.

Abstract

Recent advances in high-temperature-superconductor technology have made substantially higher toroidal magnetic fields technologically accessible, reopening the design space for compact, high-field tokamak reactors. Because reactor performance projections remain anchored to empirical confinement scalings, the recent update to the ITPA global H-mode confinement database raises an important question: what does the present experimental record and its uncertainty imply for the path to reactor-grade fusion performance? In this work, we revisit confinement extrapolation from an explicitly extrapolation-oriented perspective and, to complement its implications in terms of a direct reactor performance measure, present a cross-machine empirical scaling for fusion power. We systematically search for a minimally complex confinement scaling that optimizes the tradeoff between variance capture and extrapolative robustness. We find that low-order models centered near $N=3$ to $N=4$ optimize this tradeoff, with plasma current, machine size, heating power, and elongation emerging as the dominant engineering levers, together with an empirically inferred confinement penalty associated with metallic walls. Recast in reactor-performance terms, the results indicate that both the fusion triple product and fusion power are governed primarily by plasma current: the triple product scales approximately as $I_p^2$, and the empirical fusion power scaling exhibits a similarly near-quadratic dependence over a survey of the highest performing discharges across several machines. Projecting to reactors, these results suggest that high-field devices with metal walls may require higher plasma current than standard IPB98$(y,2)$-based expectations imply, and that gigawatt-class tokamak performance likely demands operation at $I_p \gtrsim 20\mathrm{MA}$.