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NN Asks: Is the U.S. ready for nuclear construction to accelerate?
Craig Stover
Yes, but . . .
The United States is better positioned today for nuclear construction than it has been in decades. Some of that comes from the experience gained at Vogtle and V.C. Summer. I was part of the team that helped start the V.C. Summer project in 2008, and at that time we were trying to build a nuclear construction workforce from scratch. We learned a lot through that effort, and many of those lessons learned have since been studied, documented, and shared.
The nuclear industry is also benefiting from the wave of investment that started growing around 2020. Over the last five or six years, there has been a serious effort across the country to get ready for new nuclear builds. The U.S. government and the private sector are investing billions of dollars in new nuclear. Much of that work is happening before widespread commercial deployment contracts are signed. This is real, and we need to prepare.
S. Bhandarkar, J. Reynolds, S. Letts, S. Baxamusa, E. Lindsey
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 177-189
Technical Paper | Selected papers from 20th Target Fabrication Meeting, May 20-24, 2012, Santa Fe, NM, Guest Editor: Robert C. Cook | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-TFM20-33
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is well known that control of the intricate surface topography details of the ablator capsule over a wide range of modes is critical for inertial confinement fusion (ICF). Whereas considerable effort has been expended on making the ablator capsule rounder and smoother during its fabrication, it is only more recently that attention has been drawn to particulate contamination on the surface of the capsule that can also contribute to undesirable Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. In this paper, we explore new methods for cleaning the soft polymeric capsule in the presence of the attached filltube just before its assembly into the final target. These constraints, in conjunction with the extremely demanding specification for the size and the number of particles allowed per specification, present unique challenges and require the implementation of specialized cleaning techniques. Here, we describe the strengths and limitations of these methods and lay out the platform for implementing these into production on the National Ignition Facility (NIF).