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August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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DOE approves Xcimer’s laser fusion power plant design
The Department of Energy has approved Xcimer Energy's Athena fusion power plant preconceptual technical design. With this milestone achieved, the Denver, Colo.-based company is now moving forward with its plans to develop economical laser inertial confinement fusion using two beamlines, gas laser technology, and a molten salt fusion chamber.
The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory demonstrated net energy gain from inertial confinement fusion in 2022 using solid-state glass lasers and 192 beamlines.
Akiyuki Seki, Masanori Yoshikawa, Ryota Nishinomiya, Shoichiro Okita, Shigeru Takaya, Xing Yan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 6 | June 2024 | Pages 1003-1014
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2273566
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the case of a new nuclear reactor, existing evaluation experience is limited; thus, accidents and troubles may occur as a result of such lack of experience. To deal with such situations, it is desirable to use a virtual nuclear plant to reproduce behaviors under various conditions and identify unknown anomalies from the behaviors. Then, when an abnormal situation occurs, one can quickly determine the cause of the abnormality to operate plant equipment and return the plant to a stable condition as quickly as possible. Two types of deep neural network (DNN) systems have been constructed to support the identification of unknown anomalies and the determination of their causes. One is a surrogate system that can estimate physical quantities of a nuclear power plant in a computational time of several orders less than a physical simulation model. The other is an abnormal situation identification system that can estimate the state of the disturbance causing an anomaly from physical quantities of a nuclear power plant. Both systems are trained and tested using data obtained from the analytical code for incore and plant dynamics (ACCORD), which reproduces the steady and dynamic behavior of the actual High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor (HTTR) under various scenarios. The DNN models are built by adjusting the main hyperparameters. Through these procedures, these systems are shown to be able to perform with a high degree of accuracy.