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AI and productivity growth
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month’s issue of Nuclear News focuses on supply and demand. The “supply” part of the story highlights nuclear’s continued success in providing electricity to the grid more than 90 percent of the time, while the “demand” part explores the seemingly insatiable appetite of hyperscale data centers for steady, carbon-free energy.
Technically, we are in the second year of our AI epiphany, the collective realization that Big Tech’s energy demands are so large that they cannot be met without a historic build-out of new generation capacity. Yet the enormity of it all still seems hard to grasp.
or the better part of two decades, U.S. electricity demand has been flat. Sure, we’ve seen annual fluctuations that correlate with weather patterns and the overall domestic economic performance, but the gigawatt-hours of electricity America consumed in 2021 are almost identical to our 2007 numbers.
W. Boersma-Klein, J. Kistemaker
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 20 | Number 4 | December 1991 | Pages 610-614
Advanced Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A11946906
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Because of the steep temperature profile in a gas core fission reactor, various heat transfer processes are involved. The purpose of this work was to investigate the eventual existence of a gas blanket near the wall of the reactor, where kinetic heat transfer dominates. We define the gas blanket as the distance from the wall where the kinetic heat transfer equals the radiative one. We find that for a spherical reactor with a radius of 2 m, the gas blanket has a size of
0.8 m for a thermal power of 5 MW
0.5 m for a thermal power of 10 MW
0.2 m for a thermal power of 50 MW
For a reactor operating with a thermal power of 1MW the kinetic heat flux is always higher than the radiative one.