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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.
Ezgi Gursel, Bhavya Reddy, Katy Daniels, Jamie Baalis Coble, Mahboubeh Madadi, Vivek Agarwal, Ronald Boring, Vaibhav Yadav, Anahita Khojandi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 12 | December 2024 | Pages 2299-2311
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2338507
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In nuclear power plants (NPPs), anomalies arising from sensors or human errors (HEs) can undermine the performance and reliability of plant operations. Anomaly detection models can be employed to detect sensor errors and HEs. Additionally, physics-informed machine learning models can utilize the known physics of the system, as described by mathematical equations, to ensure that sensor values are consistent with physical laws. Hence, we propose SPIDARman: System-level Physics-Informed Detection of Anomalies in Reactor Collected Data Considering Human Errors, a holistic physics-informed anomaly detection approach based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) to detect anomalies in both automatically collected sensor data and manually collected surveillance data. We test our approach on data collected from a flow loop testbed, showcasing its potential to detect anomalies. Results demonstrate that the proposed model performs better than the baseline GAN-based models in detecting sensor and surveillance anomalies, suggesting the potential of physics-informed anomaly detection GAN models in NPPs.