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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.
A.E. Robson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 20 | Number 4 | December 1991 | Pages 858-862
Magnetic Fusion Reactors/Beam-Driven Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A11946949
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent developments in z-pinch stability theory and encouraging results from frozen-fiber pinch experiments have led to renewed interest in the simple linear pinch as a possible fusion system. In this paper, a zero-dimensional pinch model coupled to a realistic circuit model is used to establish a point design. It is assumed that the pinch remains stable only as long as the current is rising, and that the magnetic energy can be recovered efficiently after the pinch has gone unstable. It is then shown that a self-sustaining cycle is possible in which circuit losses are balanced by direct conversion of some of the alpha-particle energy, and no net energy input is required. The repetition rate is limited by the rate at which the helium reaction product can be pumped away. A reactor operating at 40 Hz could produce about 350 MWth from a reactor vessel 2 - 3 m in diameter.