Stability of a weakly collisional plasma with runaway electrons

We investigate the problem of the tearing stability of a post-disruption weakly collisional plasma where the current is completely carried by runaway electrons. We adopt here a two fluid model which takes into account also ion sound Larmor radius and electron inertia effects in the description of the reconnection process. In the past, it has been demonstrated in [Helander et al. Phys. Plasmas 14, 12, (2007)] that in the purely resistive regime the presence of runaway electrons in plasma has a significant effect on the saturated magnetic island width. In particular, runaway electrons generated during disruption can cause an increase of 50% in the saturated magnetic island width with respect to the case with no runaway electrons. These results were obtained adopting a periodic equilibrium magnetic field that limited the analysis to small size saturated magnetic islands. Here we present our results to overcome this limitation adopting a non-periodic Harris’ type equilibrium magnetic field. Preliminary results on the effects of the ion sound Larmor radius effects will also be presented.