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Latest News
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.
Ehab Hassan, C. E. Kessel, J. M. Park, W. R. Elwasif, R. E. Whitfield, K. Kim, P. B. Snyder, D. B. Batchelor, D. E. Bernholdt, M. R. Cianciosa, D. L. Green, K. J. H. Law
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 3 | April 2023 | Pages 189-212
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2145826
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several configurations for the core and pedestal plasma are examined for a predefined tokamak design by implementing multiple heating/current drive (H/CD) sources to achieve an optimum configuration of high fusion power in a noninductive operation while maintaining an ideally magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) stable core plasma using the IPS-FASTRAN framework. IPS-FASTRAN is a component-based lightweight coupled simulation framework that is used to simulate magnetically confined plasma by integrating a set of high-fidelity codes to construct the plasma equilibrium (EFIT, TOQ, and CHEASE), calculate the turbulent heat and particle transport fluxes (TGLF), model various H/CD systems (TORIC, TORAY, GENRAY, and NUBEAM), model the pedestal pressure and width (EPED), and estimate the ideal MHD stability (DCON). The TGLF core transport model and EPED pedestal model are used to self-consistently predict plasma profiles consistent with ideal MHD stability and H/CD (and bootstrap) current sources. In order to evaluate the achievable and sustainable plasma beta, varying configurations are produced ranging from the no-wall stability to with-wall stability regimes, simultaneously subject to the self-consistent TGLF, EPED, and H/CD source profile predictions that optimize configuration performance. The pedestal density, plasma current, and total injected power are scanned to explore their impact on the target plasma configuration, fusion power, and confinement quality. A set of fully noninductive scenarios are achieved by employing ion-cyclotron, neutral beam injection, helicon, and lower-hybrid H/CDs to provide a broad profile for the total current drive in the core region for a predefined tokamak design. These noninductive scenarios are characterized by high fusion gain (Q ~ 4) and power (Pfus ~ 600 MW), optimum confinement quality (H98 ~ 1.1), and high bootstrap current fraction (fBS ~ 0.7) for Greenwald fraction below unity. The broad current profile configurations identified are stable to low-n kink modes either because the normalized pressure β is below the no-wall limit or a wall is present.