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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.”
R. R. Paguio, S. P. Paguio, C. A. Frederick, A. Nikroo, O. Acenas
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 743-749
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1195
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Poly(-methylstyrene) (PAMS) shells are made by microencapsulation and used in the fabrication of a large variety of targets for the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) program. Although this process has previously been developed into production mode, the yield of shells with acceptable sphericity and wall uniformity in the OMEGA size range (800-1000 m) has been poor (~ 18%). We have made improvements in the yield of these shells by modifying the composition of the outer water solution (W2) in the microencapsulation emulsion. This improvement was achieved by increasing the concentration of Poly Vinyl Alcohol (PVA) from 0.3% to 1.0% and an addition of 0.1% Poly Acrylic Acid (PAA). These modifications were aimed at increasing the interfacial surface tension in the emulsion but also appear to have played a role in density matching the components in the PAMS emulsion. These modifications improved the out of round (OOR) and non-concentricity (NC) of the PAMS mandrels resulting in as increase in the yield of target quality batches based on these basic criteria from 18% to over 80%. Meanwhile, the vacuole content and the surface finish of the PAMS shells were not adversely affected by these changes.