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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.”
Akira Oikawa, Naoyuki Miya, Kozo Kodama, Takashi Umehara, Takeshi Yamazaki, Kei Masaki, Isamu Akiyama, Kozo Matsushita, Nobuyuki Hosogane
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 612-616
Device, Facility, and Operation | Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology Tsukuba, Japan November 12-16, 2001 | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A22661
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Effluent of tritium in vacuum exhaust in JT-60 through the stack to environment always remains a level below detectable level (<10−5Bq/cm3 at the stack, <10−7Bq/cm3 at the site boundary). Though tritium concentration of drain water is below the limit of regulations of the local agreement and the law, small tritium contamination in the facility drain and in the rain drain of stack appeared occasionally. For a scheduled maintenance work of the in-vessel components, following an annual deuterium plasma discharge campaign, a 4-week no-deuterium (H or He) plasma discharge campaign and the succeeded ventilation by room air allow to reduce tritium on the interior surface of in-vessel components. This cleaning up shots and air introduction allowed workers to enter into the vacuum vessel. Air blow well tends to remove surface tritium elements and would be necessary before disassembly and replacement of components on vacuum pumping lines.