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Second round of Launch Pad selections includes eight newcomers
The National Reactor Innovation Center at Idaho National Laboratory has announced 13 project selections across 12 companies for the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad, a Department of Energy–led program that integrates reactor and fuel facility authorization, testing, and deployment support for private nuclear developers.
The Launch Pad emerged from the Reactor Pilot Program and Fuel Line Pilot Program.
According to INL, projects selected include reactor development and nuclear fuel cycle advancements, including fabrication, enrichment, and conversion technologies.
M. M. Balkey, R. D. Day, S. H. Batha, N. E. Elliot, T. Pierce, D. L. Sandoval, K. P. Garrard, A. Sohn
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 2 | March 2004 | Pages 107-112
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A435
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Shock waves generated during inertial confinement fusion implosions propagate toward the center of the capsule encountering interfaces between materials with different densities, such as between the ablator and the DT fuel. These interactions are hydrodynamically unstable and the resulting instability causes mixing of the materials at the interface, which is predicted to have detrimental effects on fusion burn. In this experiment, the growth of a single-mode perturbation machined into a radiographically opaque marker layer, driven by a strong shock, is measured during a cylindrically symmetric implosion. These measurements are used to validate simulations and theories of the complex hydrodynamics. Since any perturbation on the marker layer surface will lead to instability growth, precise knowledge of the initial conditions is critical. The targets used in this experiment have up to a 3.0-m-amplitude, mode 28 ( = 98 m) sinusoidal perturbation machined into a 438-m-outerradius aluminum band with a nominal thickness of 8 m. The perturbations were machined using a fast-tool servo [B. JARED and T. A. DOW, Precision Engineering Center Annual Report, North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC, p. 123 (1996)] and were metrologized using a linear variable differential transformer [FRANK J. OLIVER, Practical Instrumentation Tranducers, p. 42-45, Hayden Book Company (1971)]. In this paper, the importance of metrology is discussed and is shown to be critical to the interpretation of experimental results.