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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
C.P.C. Wong, R.F. Bourque, E.T. Cheng, R.L. Creedon, K.R. Schultz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 633-640
Blanket Design and Evaluation | Proceedings of the Seveth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Reno, Nevada, June 15–19, 1986) | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24814
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Elongated Tokamak (ET) is an innovative concept that uses a highly elongated plasma (plasma height-to-width ratio of 6–10) to allow high plasma currrent and high toroidal betas. ET has the potential for the development of small-size, high-power density, low-cost fusion reactors using normal conducting coils. The elongated plasma shape is achieved by use of a continuous stack of PF coils parallel to the plasma surface on both inbound and outbound sides. To achieve plasma stability, these coil stacks must be located no further than one plasma minor radius from the plasma edge, greatly restricting the space available for blankets. In order to assess the potential of a small reactor, we evaluated and designed blankets 30 to 40 cm thick. Three different thin blanket designs were found to be acceptable: FLiBe self-cooled, helium-cooled lithium, and helium-cooled 17Li83Pb blanket designs. A lithium-cooled integrated blanket-coil design (BLITZ-coil) was also found to be suitable for the ET commercial reactor.