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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Gregory R. Piefer, John F. Santarius, Robert P. Ashley, Gerald L. Kulcinski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1255-1259
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Nonelectric Applications | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A860
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent developments in helicon ion sources and Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) device performance at UW-Madison have enabled low pressure (< 50 torr, 6.7 mPa) operating conditions that should allow the 3He-3He fusion reaction to be observed in an IEC device. An ion source capable of delivering a ~ 10 mA 3He ion beam into an IEC device with minimal neutral gas flow has been designed and tested. Furthermore, a new IEC device that has never been operated with deuterium has been constructed to avoid D-3He protons from obstructing the 3He-3He reaction product spectrum, and to minimize Penning ionization of deuterium by excited helium, which in the past is suspected to have limited the ionized density of He. These developments make it possible to study beam-background 3He-3He fusion reactions with > 300 mA recirculating ion currents.
