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Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
J. D. Kilkenny, P. M. Bell, D. K. Bradley, D. L. Bleuel, J. A. Caggiano, E. L. Dewald, W. W. Hsing, D. H. Kalantar, R. L. Kauffman, D. J. Larson, J. D. Moody, D. H. Schneider, M. B. Schneider, D. A. Shaughnessy, R. T. Shelton, W. Stoeffl, K. Widmann, C. B. Yeamans, S. H. Batha, G. P. Grim, H. W. Herrmann, F. E. Merrill, R. J. Leeper, J. A. Oertel, T. C. Sangster, D. H. Edgell, M. Hohenberger, V. Yu. Glebov, S. P. Regan, J. A. Frenje, M. Gatu-Johnson, R. D. Petrasso, H. G. Rinderknecht, A. B. Zylstra, G. W. Cooper, C. Ruiz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 1 | January-February 2016 | Pages 420-451
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-173
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At the completion of the National Ignition Campaign (NIC), the National Ignition Facility (NIF) had about 36 different types of diagnostics. These were based on several decades of development on Nova and OMEGA and involved the whole U.S. inertial confinement fusion community. In 1994, the Joint Central Diagnostic Team documented a plan for a limited set of NIF diagnostics in the NIF Conceptual Design Report. Two decades later, these diagnostics, and many others, were installed workhorse tools for all users of NIF. We give a short description of each of the 36 different types of NIC diagnostics grouped by the function of the diagnostics, namely, target drive, target response and target assembly, stagnation, and burn. A comparison of NIF diagnostics with the Nova diagnostics shows that the NIF diagnostic capability is broadly equivalent to that of Nova in 1999. Although NIF diagnostics have a much greater degree of automation and rigor than Nova’s, new diagnostics are limited such as the higher-speed X-ray imager. Recommendations for future diagnostics on the NIF are discussed.