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RIC panel discusses pathway to fusion commercialization
Fusion leaders at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s annual Regulatory Information Conference discussed the path forward for regulating the burgeoning fusion industry. The speakers discussed government and private industry initiatives in the United States and United Kingdom, with a focus on efforts shaping the near-term deployment of commercial fusion machines.
A recurring theme was the need to explain the difference between fission and fusion. Representatives from the Department of Energy and Type One Energy highlighted this as an important distinction for regulators, as it will allow fusion to undergo its own independent maturation process for developing standards and regulations in the same way that fission has. Lea Perlas, Fusion Program director at the Virginia Department of Health, said that confusion between fission and fusion has been a common cause for misplaced concerns among community members surrounding Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ proposed fusion plant site near Richmond, Va.
Shay I. Heizler
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 166 | Number 1 | September 2010 | Pages 17-35
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-77
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The diffusion approximation for the Boltzmann (transport) equation suffers from several disadvantages. First, the diffusion approximation succeeds in describing the particle density only if it is isotropic, or close to isotropic. This feature causes the diffusion approximation to be quite accurate for highly isotropically scattering media but to yield poor agreement with the exact solution for the particle density in the case of nonisotropic behavior. To handle general media, the asymptotic diffusion approximation was first developed in the 1950s. The second disadvantage is that the parabolic nature of the diffusion equation predicts that particles will have an infinite velocity; particles at the tail of the distribution function will show up at infinite distance from a source in time t = 0+. The classical P1 approximation (which gives rise to the Telegrapher's equation) has a finite particle velocity but with the wrong value, namely, v/[square root of 3]. In this paper we develop a new approximation from the asymptotic solution of the time-dependent Boltzmann equation, which includes the correct eigenvalue of the asymptotic diffusion approximation and the (almost) correct time behavior (such as the particle velocity), for a general medium.