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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.
Arnold Lumsdaine, Joseph B. Tipton, Jr., Dennis Youchison, Venu Varma, Kirby Logan, Juergen Rapp
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 7 | October 2019 | Pages 674-682
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1637239
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Material Plasma Exposure eXperiment (MPEX) steady-state linear plasma facility is currently under design at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The facility proposes to produce ITER divertor-relevant plasma conditions with steady-state heat fluxes up to 10 MW/m2 with ion fluxes up to 1024/m2‧s. Plasmas will be produced from a helicon source with additional electron cyclotron and ion cyclotron heating, contained by superconducting magnets. MPEX will be capable of including targets that have been neutron irradiated from the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) in order to examine the effects of divertor-relevant plasma fluence on neutron-damaged materials. Targets can then be remotely transferred to an exchange chamber and moved into a handling station that is far from the MPEX magnets. Because of the high heat fluxes, the target must be actively cooled. Because the targets are activated, remote handling is required. The challenge of providing both active cooling and remote handling simultaneously has required a design and analysis effort that is the subject of this study.