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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.”
R. E. Olson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1147-1151
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A841
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Z-pinch fusion energy power plant concept is based upon an X-ray driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF) capsule having a hypothetical yield of 3 GJ with an overall target gain in the range of 50-100. In the present paper, a combination of analytic arguments, results of radiation-hydrodynamic computational simulations, and empirical scalings from Z-pinch hohlraum experiments are used to demonstrate that the absorption of approximately 6 MJ of X-ray energy by the capsule and 26 MJ by the hohlraum walls of an ICF target (~ 32 MJ total X-ray input) will be adequate to provide a 3 GJ yield. As a result, it appears that the Ref. 1 assumption of a 3 GJ thermonuclear yield with an overall target gain approaching 100 is conceptually feasible.