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60 Years of U: Perspectives on resources, demand, and the evolving role of nuclear energy
Recent years have seen growing global interest in nuclear energy and rising confidence in the sector. For the first time since the early 2000s, there is renewed optimism about the industry’s future. This change is driven by several major factors: geopolitical developments that highlight the need for secure energy supplies, a stronger focus on resilient energy systems, national commitments to decarbonization, and rising demand for clean and reliable electricity.
William C. Gough, George H. Miley
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 501-506
Experimental Facilities and Nonelectric Applications | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8952
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There are two interrelated requirements for achieving a sustainable modern world: 1) the availability of clean energy sources, and 2) the ability to close the materials cycle from use to reuse. Nature has always operated on a closed cycle process powered by solar energy. After the industrial revolution humans increasingly embarked upon an open cycle process extracting resources from the earth, dispersing them, and depositing the wastes into the earth's life support systems of air, water, and soil. Fusion energy has unique capabilities for addressing the root cause of the resulting energy-environment-economy dilemma that our planet now faces. We propose an industrial evolutionary path for solving the dilemma based on the hydrogen-boron (p-11B) fusion fuel cycle and the application of ultra-high temperature plasmas (fusion plasmas) for materials recycling. This concept is known as the Fusion Torch and would return waste material back to its original 92 elemental states. An Inertial Electrostatic Confinement fusion device is proposed due to its characteristic non-Maxwellian plasma which enables burning p-B11.