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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.”
C. G. Bathke, R. A. Krakowski, K. F. Schoenberg
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 15 | Number 2 | March 1989 | Pages 1082-1087
Plasma Heating and Current Drive — II | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A39836
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The property of reversed-field pinches (RFPs) to relax to a near-minimum-energy state is the basis of oscillating-field current drive (OFCD), wherein plasma current is driven by modulating in quadrature the external toroidal and poloidal magnetic fields. Coupled plasma/circuit OFCD simulations of RFPs ranging from present experiments (ZT-P and ZT-40M) to the reactor (TITAN) indicate that the drive frequency and the amplitude of the plasma-current oscillations decrease and the “wall-plug” current-drive efficiency increases with decreased plasma resistance so that minimum frequencies (∼25 Hz) and plasma-current amplitudes (∼1.6%) and maximum efficiencies (∼0.3 A/W) are attained in the reactor regime. Methods for minimizing the reactive powers and for optimizing the current-drive efficiency for OFCD in RFPs have been identified.