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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
L.J. Perkins, G.L. Kulcinski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 1107-1112
Blanket and First Wall Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A23006
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A self-consistent procedure has been established for economic design optimization of the lithium-lead (LiPb) blanket for the MARS tandem mirror reactor. The procedure is necessarily iterative and enables progress in blanket design to be assessed in terms of the minimization of an economic figure of merit F for the complete reactor system. Typical economic design questions regarding blanket and central cell parameters such as tritium breeding ratio, neutron energy multiplication factor, thermal cycle efficiency, blanket radial thickness, magnet radii, etc., can then be addressed in terms of their influence on overall system costs. This procedure is not necessarily specific to MARS and has general applicability to fusion reactor blanket design optimization. Application of the procedure resulted in a blanket with small (∼ 38 cm) radial thickness, highly enriched (90%) lithium, adequate tritium breeding ratio (1.14) and a neutron energy multiplication and thermal efficiency approaching those for blankets of considerably larger radial dimensions.