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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.
Alvin J. H. Lee, Lucas Wodrich, Dimitri Kalinichenko, Caleb S. Brooks, Tomasz Kozlowski
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 6 | June 2024 | Pages 1027-1041
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2276999
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The potential deployment of microreactors as a zero-emission source for critical applications within integrated energy systems such as microgrids has been gaining interest in recent years owing to the microreactors’ dispatchable nature, modular design, small site footprint, and carbon-free generation. A particularly high-value but challenging application with rapidly growing demand is in the deployment of high-performance computing (HPC) clusters within microgrids. In this work, a model of a HPC cluster in an energy-diverse microgrid is developed to determine the requirements of a technology-agnostic microreactor deployed for such a challenging application. The minute-resolution simulations revealed that the cluster’s electrical load fluctuation of up to 4.1 MW/min required a fast and responsive load-following capability. When the load-following capability of the microreactor was perturbed, the required microgrid storage capacity associated with having a 0.1 MW/min dispatchable microreactor decreased by two orders of magnitude as compared with load-following solely by energy storage devices, indicating that load-following capability in microreactors is of great value in such applications. The analysis methods described in this work can be extended to other microgrids, other HPC clusters, or other types of challenging applications, and can help microgrid planners in determining the storage size, output capacity, and ramping capabilities of the storage devices required for a given microgrid configuration.