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NN Asks: What hurdles stand in the way of nuclear power’s global expansion?
Jake Jurewicz
Nuclear technology is mature. It provides firm power at scale with minimal externalities and has done so for decades. The core problem isn’t about the technology—it is how the plants are built. Nuclear construction has a well-documented history of cost and schedule overruns. Previous nuclear plants often spent more than twice what was first budgeted, making nuclear among the power technologies with the largest average cost overruns worldwide.
Recent projects illustrate how severe the problem can be. In South Carolina, the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion saw projected costs rise from roughly $10 billion to more than $25 billion before the project was abandoned in 2017, by which time more than $9 billion had already been spent and customers were stuck paying for a site they have yet to benefit from.
C. C. Petty
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 978-987
Technical Paper | DIII-D Tokamak - Achieving Reactor Quality Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1053
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A comprehensive series of dimensionless parameter scaling experiments has been undertaken in the DIII-D tokamak with the goals of guiding turbulent transport theories and predicting confinement in future devices. These studies have measured the dependences of transport on the relative gyroradius, beta, collisionality, safety factor, cross-section shape, and ratio of ion to electron temperature. The results from these experiments, which are mainly in favor of drift wave turbulent transport, point to a favorable path for increasing the fusion performance in burning plasma devices.
