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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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.
H. Kislev, M. A. Gundersen, G. H. Miley
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 20 | Number 4 | December 1991 | Pages 843-849
Electrostatic Confined Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A11946947
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial Electrostatic Confined (IEC) fusion is a potentially attractive scheme for compact neutron-lean fusion reactors suitable for marine propulsion and deep space travel. Recent studies have indicated that efficient IEC devices require pulsed ion sources. However, existing pulsed ion diode schemes (e.g. Magnetically Insulated Diode (MID)) are not optimized for IEC applications. We propose a novel MID scheme which utilizes a modified Back. Lighted Thyratron (BLT) switch, both as a repetitive switch and a repetitive ion source. The extractable electron beam current from a fully developed BLT discharge was simulated using a simple electron trajectory integrator. The model's results appear to be in good agreement with the measured electrons escape fractions. The electron beam's escape fraction appears to be much higher when using a newly proposed ring-BLT configuration. The detailed results and additional potential applications of the proposed BLT configurations are also included.