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Latest News
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.”
B. Coppi, P. Detragiache, S. Migliuolo, M. Nassi,, B. Rogers
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 25 | Number 3 | May 1994 | Pages 353-367
Technical Paper | Alpha-Particle Special / Experimental Device | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A30292
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Ignitor experiment has been designed to achieve fusion burn and ignition conditions in a high-density deuterium-tritium (D-T) plasma with a compact high magnetic field confinement configuration. The recent addition of a powerful system of radio-frequency heating to the design of Ignitor allows the investigation of physics issues relevant to advanced D-3He reactors and the second stability region forfinite-β plasmas. To maximize the production of D-3He power, a lower density regime is considered (e.g., n0 ≃ 3 × 1020 m−3) than that found to be optimal for D-T ignition (n0 ≃ 1 × 1021 m−3). This allows a relatively large population of 3He nuclei at high energies ≳0.65 MeV to be produced by a high density of injected power at the 3He ion cyclotron frequency (up to 18 MW injected in the plasma column of volume ≲10 m3). The investigation of second stability region access can be carried out in relatively low magnetic field and plasma current regimes with the added benefit that the duration of the plasma discharge can be extended over relatively long times. In fact, the Ignitor magnets can be brought down to an initial temperature of 30 K by gas-helium cooling. The low aspect ratio (≃2.8) and elongated plasma cross section of Ignitor make it suitable to reach both finite-β conditions and interesting plasma regimes at the same time. The Candor concept is the next step in the evolution of the Ignitor program. Candor is capable of producing plasma currents up to 25 MA with toroidal magnetic fields BT ≃ 13 T. Unlike Ignitor, Candor would operate with values of βp around 1.5 and with the central part of the plasma column in the second stability region. The D-3He ignition in this case can be reached by a combination of ICRF heating and alpha-particle heating due to D-T fusion reactions.