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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Alan L. Hoffman, Pete Gurevich, Jim Grossnickle, John T. Slough
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 36 | Number 2 | September 1999 | Pages 109-125
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A96
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Compact toroids can be used for fueling other fusion devices by accelerating them to high enough velocities to penetrate strong magnetic fields. In the simplest analysis, the kinetic energy density of a flux-excluding object 1/2v2 must exceed the magnetic field energy density B2/20 of the field to be pushed aside. Field reversed configurations (FRCs) are a type of compact toroid that are particularly efficient for this application due to their high density and thus lower required energy per unit mass. FRCs are also formed and accelerated inductively, thus minimizing possible impurity contamination. The Tokamak Refueling by Accelerated Plasmoids (TRAP) experiment was built to develop the inductive acceleration method and test the ability of high-velocity FRCs to penetrate transverse magnetic fields. Simple models have been developed for both the acceleration and penetration processes to determine fueler parameters required for a given tokamak field. Experimental results are given for the acceleration process. Half-milligram FRCs with number densities of 1022 m-3 were accelerated to velocities of 200 km/s, sufficient to fuel tokamaks with Tesla magnetic fields. The technology is easily extendable to much higher FRC densities and velocities, sufficient to fuel the largest, highest-field tokamaks.