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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.”
G. W. Barnes, A. Janos, D. Loesser, D. K. Owens, M. Ulrickson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1761-1764
Impurity Control and Plasma-Facing Component | Proceedings of the Ninth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Oak Brook, Illinois, October 7-11, 1990) | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29597
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The TFTR Bumper Limiter (BL)1,2 is a continuous toroidal belt limiter which subtends 120° poloidally on the inner wall of the vacuum vessel, is symmetric about the midplane of the vessel and has a total area of 22 m2. The plasma facing surface of the BL consists of graphite tiles mounted on water-cooled Inconel backing plates. During plasma operation with high power neutral beam injection (NBI), “carbon blooms”3 developed when surface temperatures at localized areas on the limiter exceeded 1700 C. The blooms severely limited plasma performance. During the February–April 1990 shutdown, 721 of the original POCO graphite tiles were replaced with 4D Carbon Fiber Composite (CFC)4 tiles to improve the performance of the Bumper Limiter. Another source of blooms was cutouts in the BL made for diagnostic access to the plasma. During the shutdown, the edge tiles at the cutouts were modified to reduce the power flux to levels insufficient to cause a bloom. This paper describes the tile replacement and modification program including material selection and the rationale for the tile replacement locations. The methods used to mechanically align the midplane of the limiter to ±0.5mm are addressed. Future plans to align the entire limiter to the toroidal magnetic field to similar accuracy using magnetic and mechanical measurements will also be discussed. The improvement in plasma performance due to the suppression of blooms due to these upgrades will be shown.