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DOE selects first companies for nuclear launch pad
The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy and the National Reactor Innovation Center have announced their first selections for the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad: three companies developing microreactors and one developing fuel supply.
The four companies—Deployable Energy, General Matter, NuCube Energy, and Radiant Industries—were selected from the initial pool of Reactor Pilot Program and Fuel Line Pilot Program applicants, the two precursor programs to the launch pad.
A. R. Raffray, L. El-Guebaly, G. Federici, D. Haynes, F. Najmabadi, D. Petti, ARIES-IFE Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 3 | November 2004 | Pages 417-437
Technical Paper | ARIES-IFE | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A581
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The chamber wall armor is subject to demanding conditions in inertial fusion energy (IFE) chambers. IFE operation is cyclic in nature, and key issues are (a) chamber evacuation to ensure that after each shot the chamber returns to a quiescent state in preparation for the target injection and the firing of the driver for the subsequent shot and (b) armor lifetime that requires that the armor accommodate the cyclic energy deposition while providing the required lifetime. Armor erosion would impact both of these requirements. Tungsten and carbon are considered as armor for IFE dry-wall chambers based on their high-temperature and high-heat-flux accommodation capabilities. This paper assesses the requirements on armor imposed by the operating conditions in IFE, including energy deposition density, time of deposition, and frequencies; describes their impact on the performance of the candidate armor materials; and discusses the major issues.