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Swiss nuclear power and the case for long-term operation
Designed for 40 years but built to last far longer, Switzerland’s nuclear power plants have all entered long-term operation. Yet age alone says little about safety or performance. Through continuous upgrades, strict regulatory oversight, and extensive aging management, the country’s reactors are being prepared for decades of continued operation, in line with international practice.
E. R. Hodgson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 62 | Number 1 | July-August 2012 | Pages 89-96
Diagnostics | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials, Part A: Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A14118
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Present ITER diagnostics are designed to provide machine protection, basic and advanced control, fusion performance evaluation, and an extensive measurement capability for furthering plasma physics understanding. However, in the longer term beyond ITER, diagnostic components and associated materials must survive extended periods in the more hostile environment of not only DEMO, but also fusion power plants. In addition to the need to minimize penetrations in the first wall, undoubtedly due to their known high sensitivity to radiation, the use of insulators, and hence diagnostics, will be further severely restricted to those essential to operation, safety, and maintenance related to plasma control and machine protection. The problems we will have to address are related to long-term fluence or dose-related degradation of the required properties due to aggregation and segregation of radiation-induced defects and impurities present in the original materials, as well as H, He, and other transmutation elements. To resolve these challenges, long-term research activities must increase. For the diagnostics (and other systems), in situ irradiation testing is essential. In the near- to mid-term future, available experimental fission reactors will be invaluable, where even basic problems such as irradiation in vacuum and temperature control must be overcome.