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Latest News
DOE announces NEPA exclusion for advanced reactors
The Department of Energy has announced that it is establishing a categorical exclusion for the application of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedures to the authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of advanced nuclear reactors.
According to the DOE, this significant change, which goes into effect today, “is based on the experience of DOE and other federal agencies, current technologies, regulatory requirements, and accepted industry practice.”
W. W. Heidbrink
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 945-953
Technical Paper | DIII-D Tokamak - Achieving Reactor-Level Plasma Pressure | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1050
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A summary of fast ion experiments in the DIII-D tokamak is given. Most of the experiments involve ~80-keV deuterium beam ions. Deceleration of dilute fast-ion populations is accurately described by coulomb scattering theory. Fast waves with frequencies several times the deuterium cyclotron frequency interact with beam ions when the product of wave number and gyroradius k[perpendicular]i is [greater than or approximately equal to]1.4. Global confinement of fast ions is often excellent although sawteeth, tearing modes, and beam-driven instabilities can cause additional transport. Intense beam-ion populations often drive instabilities. Toroidicity-induced Alfvén eigenmodes (TAE) and somewhat lower frequency modes (originally called beta-induced Alfvén eigenmodes) are often observed in a wide variety of plasma conditions. Over 50% of the beam power is lost during strong activity. Damping mechanisms such as mode coupling or radiative damping are needed to explain the observed TAE stability threshold. The most unstable toroidal mode number agrees well with theoretical expectations, but the radial and poloidal structure of the mode and the observed beam-ion transport have not been adequately explained. The modes with frequencies below the TAE are probably two types of energetic particle modes: the resonant TAE and the resonant kinetic ballooning mode.