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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.”
George C. Vlases, D. S. Rowe, the Firebird Design Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 9 | Number 1 | January 1986 | Pages 116-135
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24707
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A compact fusion reactor design with magnetic confinement based on a field-reversed configuration is described. The reactor is linear and operates in a pulsed mode where the plasma moves as a translating “plasmoid” through the burn chamber. The plasma physics model incorporates recent theoretical and experimental results on confinement. The design is compact and its power output is limited by first-wall and blanket technology. A helium-cooled solid breeder blanket is used for tritium breeding and thermal energy removal. A graphite thermal shield is included to reduce the energy generation and resulting first-wall stresses during pulsed operation. These studies indicate that attractive designs in the range of 300 to 1000 MW(electric) are possible, provided that currently understood scaling laws extrapolate favorably into the reactor regime. Multidimensional neutronics analysis indicates tritium breeding ratios >1.0.