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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
D. A. Ehst, J. N. Brooks, Y. Cha, K. Evans, Jr., A. M. Hassanein, S. Kim, S. Majumdar, B. Misra, H. C. Stevens
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 8 | Number 1 | July 1985 | Pages 727-730
Power Reactor Studies | Proceedings of the Sixth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (San Francisco, California, March 3-7, 1985) | doi.org/10.13182/FST85-A40124
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Consideration of burn cycle options for commercial tokamaks shows that there is substantial motivation to achieve steady state operation. This is partly due to longer replacement periods for first wall and impurity control components, but, in addition, large cost savings are found when magnets, power supplies, and the energy transfer system are not frequently pulsed. The hybrid burn cycle, with a combination of ohmic and noninductive current drive, does not significantly improve the economics of ohmically-driven commercial reactors with large major radius. However, an INTOR-class device has a critically small hole in the doughnut, and we find for this size tokamak that the hybrid cycle is preferred over ohmically-driven operation.