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Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Robert L. Bieri
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 752-757
Inertial Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29435
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The SAFIRE (Systems Analysis for ICF Reactor Economics) code was adapted to model a power plant using a HYLIFE-II reactor chamber. The code was then used to examine the dependence of the plant capital costs and the busbar cost of electricity (COE) on a variety of design parameters (type of driver, chamber repetition rate, and net electric power). The results show the most attractive operating space for each set of driver/target assumptions and quantify the benefits of improvements in key design parameters. The basecase plant was a 1,000-MWe plant containing a reactor vessel driven by an induction linac heavy-ion accelerater, run at 8 Hz with a driver energy of 6.73 MJ and a target yield of 350 MJ. The total direct cost for this plant was $2.6 billion. (All costs in this paper are given in equivalent 1988 dollars.) The COE was 8.5 ¢/(kW·h). The COE and total capital costs for a 1,000-MWe base plant are nearly independent of the chosen combination of repetition rate and driver energy for a driver operating between 4 and 10 Hz. For comparison, the COE for a coal or future fission plant would be 4.5–5.5 ¢/(kW·h). The COE for a 1,000-MWe plant could be reduced to 7.5 ¢/(kW·h) by using advanced targets and could be cut to 6.5 ¢/(kW·h) with conventional targets, if the driver cost could be cut in half. There is a large economy of scale with heavy-ion-driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF) plants. A 2,000-MWe plant with a heavy-ion driver and a HYLIFE-II chamber would have a COE of only 5.8 ¢/(kW·h).