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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.
J. P. Lestone, M. D. Rosen, P. Adsley
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 1 | December 2021 | Pages S352-S355
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1909372
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
During the Manhattan Project, a simple formula was developed by Bethe and Feynman in 1943 to estimate the yield of a fission-only nuclear explosion of a uniformly dense bare sphere of supercritical fissile material. We have not found any evidence that Bethe and Feynman knew of the first yield formula obtained by Frisch and Peierls contained within their famous March 1940 memorandum. Similarly, we have not found any technical documents that compare the Bethe-Feynman formula to the earlier works of Frisch and Peierls or Serber. After adjusting for differences in the labeling of critical radii, we find that earlier formulas only differ by a scaling factor.