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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
In transition: Commercializing fusion power
Commercial fusion power is closer than ever. There are now around 30 U.S. fusion companies, several of which claim to be on track to connect to the grid as early as the 2030s.
Tokamak and laser inertial confinement approaches benefit from decades of research at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and ITER, with alternative concepts including stellarator, magnetic mirror, and Z-pinch confinement also making notable progress as private and government funding for fusion increases.
Viktoriya V. Kulik, John C. Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 153 | Number 1 | May 2006 | Pages 69-89
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2596
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The presence of a localized spallation source in an accelerator-driven subcritical system leads to significant spatial variations in the power distribution and invalidates the simple point-kinetics approach. To eliminate higher-harmonics contamination in the detector response and to account properly for spatial and spectral effects in reactivity determination, a method directly combining measurements with numerical simulations of the experimental data is developed through a quasi-static formulation. The method provides space-time correction to a variety of traditional point-kinetics techniques and determines the reactivity essentially independent of the detector position, as long as sufficiently accurate information on the reactor configuration is provided. In the current work, the space-time corrections are derived for two well-known point-kinetics methods: area-ratio technique and -method. Numerical simulations performed with the FX2-TH diffusion theory code along with a space-time analysis of MUSE-4 pulsed source experimental data illustrate the applicability of the proposed methods for the determination of significant subcriticality levels in fast and thermal reactor systems.