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Construction begins on Kairos’s fluoride salt–cooled test reactor
Earlier today, on a site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that was formerly home to the K-33 Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Kairos Power marked the start of construction on its low-power demonstration reactor. Named Hermes, the 35-MWt test reactor claims status as the first Gen IV reactor to be approved for construction by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the first non–light water reactor to be permitted in the United States in more than 50 years.
Mamoru Matsuoka, Masanori Araki, Makoto Mizuno†
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 4 | December 1994 | Pages 1296-1303
Technical Paper | Energy Storage, Switching, and Conversion | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A30314
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The concept of a direct energy recovery system that applies a varying magnetic field is proposed for a negative-ion-based neutral beam injection system (NNB) to heat a plasma and/or drive a plasma current in a fusion reactor. The output beam energy and power of such an NNB will be ∼1 MeV and ∼ 10 MW/beamline, respectively, and nearly the same amounts of positive- and negative-ion beams remain unneutralized in an NNB by using a gas-neutralizing cell. Therefore, the output of a beam direct converter in an NNB is a bipolar direct current (dc) electric power with close to ±1 MV and several amperes if a conventional electrostatic or magnetostatic field is applied for ion beam separation. However, such high-voltage dc power is difficult to handle at the point of the regeneration of the power back to a commercial electric line because a very high voltage inverter tough enough to withstand occasional sparkdowns at recovery electrodes is required. If residual positive- and negative-ion beams are introduced to two or more electrodes in turn by a varying magnetic field, an alternating current (ac) electric power can be produced directly. The ac voltage can be easily lowered by a stepdown transformer, and a conventional, low-voltage inverter can be used. Such a beam direct converter will greatly reduce the technological difficulty involved in the regeneration of a recovered electric energy. The total efficiency of an NNB will be improved from ∼45 to ∼70% with a beam direct converter.