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GAIN makes diverse selections for its third round of awards this year
The Department of Energy’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear has recently awarded four third-round fiscal year 2026 vouchers to support the development of innovative nuclear technologies. Each company will get access to specific capabilities and expertise in the DOE’s national laboratory complex—in this round of awards Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories are named—and will be responsible for a minimum 20 percent cost share, which can be an in-kind contribution.
David R. Mikkelsen, Clifford E. Singer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 237-252
Technical Paper | Special Section Content / Fusion Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22816
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent developments in neutral beam technology prompt us to reconsider the prospects for steady-state tokamak reactors. A mathematical reactor model is developed that includes the physics of beam-driven currents and reactor power balance, as well as reactor and beam system costs. This model is used to find the plasma temperatures that minimize the reactor cost per unit of net electrical output. The optimum plasma temperatures are nearly independent of ß and are roughly twice as high as the optimum temperatures for ignited reactors. If beams of neutral deuterium atoms with near-optimum energies of 1 to 2 MeV are used to drive the current in a reactor the size of the International Tokamak Reactor, then the optimum temperatures are typically Te ≃ 12 to 15 keV and Ti≃ 17 to 21 keV for a wide range of model parameters. Net electrical output rises rapidly with increasing deuterium beam energy for Eb ≾ 400 keV, but rises only slowly above Eb ∼ 1 MeV. We estimate that beam-driven steady-state reactors could be economically competitive with pulsed-ignition reactors if cyclic-loading problems limit the toroidal magnetic field strength of pulsed reactors to ≾85% of that allowed in steady-state reactors.