Generation of runaway electrons during the thermal quench in tokamaks

This work provides a systematic description of electron kinetics during impurity dominated thermal quenches. A Fokker–Planck equation for the hot electrons and a power balance equation for the bulk plasma are solved self-consistently, with impurity radiation as the dominant energy loss mechanism. We find that runaway production is facilitated by heavy injection of impurities up to prompt conversion of the total current into a sub-MeV runaway current. We also find that runaway formation is less efficient in plasmas with high pre-quench temperatures and predict significant radial variation of the runaway seed in such plasmas.