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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.”
E.M. Drobyshevski, B.G. Zhukov, R.O. Kurakin, V.A. Sakharov, A.M. Studenkov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 649-653
Plasma Fueling and Fuel Cycle | Proceedings of the Eleventh Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy New Orleans, Louisiana June 19-23, 1994 | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A40230
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Small body launching that uses gas or plasma faces the fundamental problem caused by excess energy loss that is due to the great wall surface/volume ratio of the barrel. For example, the efficiency of the plasma armature (PA) rail-gun acceleration is maximum for 8–10 mm-size bodies and drops as their size decreases.1 That is why in the case of nuclear fusion applications, where 1–2 mm-size pellets at 5–10 km/s velocity are desirable, electromagnetic launchers have not yet demonstrated an advantage over light-gas guns and one is now forced to search for a compromise between the pellet size (increasing it up to #3–4 mm) and its velocity (decreasing it down to ≈3 km/s).. As a whole, the probability of attaining 5–10 km/s velocity for 1–2 mm pellets seems to be rather remote at the present. When designing the 1 mm railgun that exploits the PA, we made use of our concept of dielectric pellet launching at the greatest constant acceleration, which is close to the strength or the electrode skin-layer explosion limits.2 That shortened the barrel length sufficiently. The system become highly compact, with the electrode length ≈10–16 cm, thus permitting the rapid test of new operation modes as well as modifications of the design, including magnetic field augmentation and the use of a compacted PA.3 As a result of these refinements, the difficulties caused by the catastrophic supply of mass ablated from the electrodes were overcome and regimes of 1–2 mm plastic pellets without sabot accelerated to 5 km/s were found. No pre-accelerator is used. The launcher operates in air at atmospheric conditions. The potentials and prospects of the small system created are far from being exhausted and deserve further elaboration.