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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.
Wade Marcum, Daniel LaBrier, Emory Brown, Colby Jensen, Yong-Joon Choi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 6 | June 2020 | Pages 911-923
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1713673
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effort to perform transient (TR) testing of nuclear fuel and materials in the United States took an important step in 2017 with the resumption of operations at the Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) Facility at the Idaho National Laboratory. As part of this restart effort, a U.S. Department of Energy–funded grant was tasked with developing a set of computational and experimental benchmarks for prior TR activities in order to assess the capabilities of historically developed codes used to provide the safety case for experimental design and evaluation. One subset of tasks in this project was the development of an experimental facility—the Transient Reactor Test Loop (TRTL) Facility—that would emulate a pump-driven flowing water loop that would be implemented at the TREAT Facility for TR testing of light water reactor fuel. The TRTL Facility was designed and developed at Oregon State University and began operations testing in 2017. Empirical data produced by this new experimental flow loop was benchmarked against a set of codes that represent the standard for use in industrial [Reactor Excursion and Leak Analysis Program–Three Dimensional (RELAP5-3D)] and regulatory [TRAC/Reactor Excursion and Leak Analysis Program (RELAP) Advanced Computational Engine (TRACE)] settings. The findings from those benchmarking activities from the TRTL Facility and the comparisons with the established safety codes are presented here.