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Latest News
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.”
Steven V. Gorman, William J. Carmack, Patricia B. Hembree
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 34 | Number 3 | November 1998 | Pages 745-749
Safety and Environment | doi.org/10.13182/FST98-A11963703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There are important safety issues associated with tokamak dust, accumulated primarily from sputtering and disruptions. The dust may contain tritium, it may be activated, chemically toxic, and chemically reactive. The purpose of this paper is to present results from analyses of particulate collected from the Alcator C-MOD tokamak located at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts following the run period ending in spring of 1997. The sample obtained from C-MOD was not originally intended for examination outside of MIT. The sample was collected with the intent of performing only a composition analysis. However, MIT provided the INEEL with this sample for particle analysis. The sample was collected by vacuuming a section of the machine (covering approximately 1/3 of the machine surface) with a coarse fiber filter as the collection surface. The sample was then analyzed using an optical microscope, SEM microscope, Microtrac FRA particle size analyzer. The data fit a log-normal distribution. The count median diameter (CMD) of the samples ranged from 0.3 μm to 1.1 μm with geometric standard deviations (GSD) ranging from 2.8 to 5.2 and a mass median diameter (MMD) ranging from 7.22 to 176 μm.