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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.
Kai Masuda, Tomoya Nakagawa, Taiju Kajiwara, Heishun Zen, Kiyoshi Yoshikawa, Kazunobu Nagasaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 523-527
Experimental Facilities and Nonelectric Applications | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8956
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion device driven by a ring-shaped built-in ion source is proposed and designed aiming at a reduced operating gas pressure in order to explore a possibility of a drastic enhancement in the fusion reaction rate in the envisaged beam-beam collision regime. In the present scheme ions will be extracted from a ring-shaped magnetron discharge plasma toward an IEC cathode grid placed concentrically at the center. A prototype ion source showed an accessible pressure of 5 mPa, which is hundreds times as low as the conventional glow-discharge-driven IEC. Dependence of the ion source current and extraction efficiency on the central IEC cathode voltage was studied by prototype experiments and numerical calculations. An IEC device with a built-in ion source was then designed based on these results. The expected IEC grid current is ~0.4 mA at 5 mPa, where observation of the beam-beam fusion contribution is anticipated.