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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.
Donald A. Spong, Jeff A. Holmes, Jean-n. Leboeuf, Peggy Jo Christenson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 3 | November 1990 | Pages 496-504
Alpha Particles in Fusion Research | Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29285
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Alpha-particle populations can significantly alter existing magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities in tokamaks through kinetic effects and coupling to otherwise stable shear Alfvén waves. Resonances of the trapped alpha-particle precessional drift, with the usual ballooning mode diamagnetic frequency (ω*i/2) and the toroidicity-induced Alfvén eigenmode (TAE), are considered. These are examined for noncircular tokamaks in the high-n ballooning limit using an isotropic alpha-particle slowing down distribution and retaining the full-energy and pitch-angle dispersion in the alpha-particle drift frequency. Applying this to the Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) indicates that ballooning instabilities can persist at betas below the ideal MHD threshold. These are especially dominated by the destabilization of the TAE mode. In addition, a hybrid fluid-particle approach for simulating alpha-particle effects on pressure-gradient driven instabilities is described.
