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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.
K. Asatani, M. Shiotani, Y. Hattori
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 62 | Number 1 | January 1977 | Pages 9-19
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A26935
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new method based on the singular perturbation theory is presented for synthesizing suboptimal control of nuclear reactors with spatially distributed parameters. The inverse of the neutron velocity is regarded as a small perturbing parameter, and the model, adopted for simplicity, is an infinite slab reactor described by the one-group diffusion equation. A control is found for the problem of transferring a given distributed neutron flux to the desired one assuming the deviation is small. It is shown that the Helmholtz mode is suited for the singular perturbation technique when one carries out the modal expansion, and the mode controllability is then determined in view of the asymptotic stability of solutions, which depends on the criticality condition. The theoretical estimation of the error of solution is also attached. A numerical example is given showing a large saving of computation time in the present method.