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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.”
J. Galambos, C. Baker, Y-K. M. Peng, D. Cohn, M. Chaniotakis, L. Bromberg, S. O. Dean
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 21 | Number 3 | May 1992 | Pages 1759-1764
Magnetic Fusion Reactor and Systems Studies | doi.org/10.13182/FST92-A29975
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The TETRA systems code is used to examine devices with both normal copper and superconducting coils as vehicles for steady-state production of fusion power in a Pilot Plant. If the constraints of plasma ignition and net electrical power production are dropped, such devices are much smaller and less expensive than ITER-like devices. For wall loads near 0.5 MW/m2 with nominal ITER physics guidelines, devices with copper coils have major radii R near 2 m and direct costs near 1 × 109 $, while devices with superconducting coils have R = 4.1 m and costs of 2.4 × 109 $. However, the copper-coil devices have the burden of hundreds of megawatts of resistive power losses. All cases tend towards high aspect ratio (A > 4), high fields, and low current. The situation improves for the superconducting-coil cases if higher beta limits are permissible, whereas the copper-coil cases see less benefit from higher beta limits.