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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.”
M. Bakhtiari, R. Yoshino, Y. Nishida
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 2 | March 2002 | Pages 77-87
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A203
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The possibility of using massive quantities of injected deuterium with and without additional admixture of lesser quantities of higher-Z impurities to effect fast thermal shutdown of a tokamak discharge without causing runaway electron avalanching is systematically studied. It is found that various combinations of deuterium alone and deuterium with impurities (helium, nitrogen, argon, and krypton) can provide acceptable runaway-free thermal shutdown. The admixture of impurities cited reduces the quantity of deuterium needed and also reduces the radiative cooling time needed for the plasma to reach final thermal equilibrium, where radiation losses balance ohmic input. In contrast, the addition of neon does not appreciably reduce deuterium quantity or promote faster cooling. This difference relative to the other impurity studies can be understood from the radiation versus plasma temperature characteristics for neon.