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From SPARC to ARC: CFS prepares for a first-of-a-kind fusion plant
Commonwealth Fusion Systems makes no small plans. The company wants to build a 400-MWe magnetic confinement fusion power plant called ARC near Richmond, Va., and begin operating it in the early 2030s. And the plans don’t end there. CFS wants to deploy “thousands” of fusion power plants capable of accelerating a global energy transition.
Swetha Veeraraghavan, Chandrakanth Bolisetti, Andrew Slaughter, Justin Coleman, Somayajulu Dhulipala, William Hoffman, Kyungtae Kim, Efe Kurt, Robert Spears, Lynn Munday
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 7 | July 2021 | Pages 1073-1095
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1807282
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Seismic analysis and risk assessment of safety-critical infrastructure like hospitals, nuclear power plants, dams, and facilities handling radioactive materials involve computationally intensive numerical models and coupled multiphysics scenarios. They are also performed in a strict regulatory environment that requires high software quality assurance standards, and in the case of safety-related nuclear facilities, a conformance to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Nuclear Quality Assurance (NQA-1) standard. This paper introduces the open-source finite-element software, MASTODON (Multi-hazard Analysis of Stochastic Time-Domain Phenomena), which implements state-of-the-art seismic analysis and risk assessment tools in a quality-controlled environment. MASTODON is built on MOOSE (Multi-physics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment), which is a highly parallelizable, NQA-1 conforming, coupled multiphysics, finite-element framework developed at Idaho National Laboratory. MASTODON is capable of fault rupture and source-to-site wave propagation using the domain reduction method, nonlinear site response, and soil-structure interaction analysis, implicit and explicit time integration, automated stochastic simulations, and seismic probabilistic risk assessment. When coupled with other MOOSE applications, MASTODON can also solve strongly and weakly coupled multiphysics problems. This paper presents a summary of the capabilities of MASTODON and some demonstrative examples.