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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
Kunioki Mima, T. Takeda, FIREX Project Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 3 | April 2006 | Pages 358-366
Technical Paper | Fast Ignition | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1154
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper introduces the next generation of fast ignition research facilities now under construction and describes in detail the Japanese project Fast Ignition Realization Experiment (FIREX-I) and its proposed follow-up, FIREX-II. Both the facilities and their scientific objectives are presented. FIREX-I and the other two facilities described in subsequent papers - OMEGA EP at the University of Rochester and the Z-Petawatt at Sandia National Laboratories - will conduct proof-of-principle experiments for the fast ignitor concept. The facilities consist of two components: a long-pulse ( > ns) driver capable of compressing and assembling the fusion fuel and a separate petawatt-class laser for heating. For the FIREX project, the present status of the construction of the 10-kJ-level, high-energy petawatt Laser for Fusion Experiment is reported, and the theoretical basis for high-density plasma heating with an ~10-kJ, 10-ps petawatt laser is discussed to show how this heating pulse is predicted to achieve the plasma parameters required for the fast ignition. The required petawatt spot size, the tolerable carbon fraction in the proposed D-T-loaded foam cryogenic target, appropriate heating laser pulse shape, and the required electron stopping range are explored. The theoretical analysis includes the use of Fokker-Planck simulation to describe the heating of the dense plasma by relativistic electrons created in the petawatt laser-plasma interactions. This modeling indicates that if 30% of the 10-kJ petawatt laser energy is coupled by relativistic electrons into D-T plasmas compressed to 100 to 200 g/cm3, the plasmas will be subsequently heated to 5 keV and fusion gains, defined as fusion energy produced divided by the total incident (compression and heating) laser energy, as high as 0.1 can result.
