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November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
DNFSB’s Summers ends board tenure, extending agency’s loss of quorum
Lee
Summers
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the independent agency responsible for ensuring that Department of Energy facilities are protective of public health and safety, announced that the board’s acting chairman, Thomas Summers, has concluded his service with the agency, having completed his second term as a board member on October 18.
Summers’ departure leaves Patricia Lee, who joined the DNFSB after being confirmed by the Senate in July 2024, as the board’s only remaining member and acting chair. Lee’s DNFSB board term ends in October 2027.
John Sheffield, John D. Galambos
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 1122-1126
Fusion Power Reactor, Economic, and Alternate Concept | Proceedings of the Eleventh Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy New Orleans, Louisiana June 19-23, 1994 | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A40304
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Work on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) tokamak has refined understanding of the realities of a deuterium-tritium (D-T) burning magnetic fusion reactor. An ITER-like tokamak reactor using ITER costs and performance would lead to a cost of electricity (COE) of about 130 mills/kWh. Advanced tokamak physics to be tested in the Toroidal Physics Experiment (TPX), coupled with moderate extrapolation in engineering, technology, and unit costs (i.e., based on the ITER design), should lead to a COE comparable with best existing fission systems around 60 mills/kWh. However, a larger unit size, ∼2000 MW(e), is favored for the fusion system. Alternative toroidal configurations to the conventional tokamak, such as the stellarator, reversed-field pinch, and field-reversed configuration, offer some potential advantage, but are less well developed, and have their own challenges.