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Deploying nuclear power: Financing, risk, and execution in the current market environment
Nielson
The renewed global interest in nuclear power is often framed as a policy story driven by decarbonization goals, energy security concerns, and surging electricity demand from digital infrastructure and electrification. While these forces are real and durable, they materially understate the challenge at hand. The practical constraint on nuclear deployment today is not strategic will, but execution. Specifically, the challenge lies in how nuclear projects are financed, how risk is allocated, and how investors assess credibility in a sector defined by long timelines and asymmetric downside risk.
M. R. Wade, T. C. Luce, J. Jayakumar, P. A. Politzer, C. C. Petty, M. Murakami, J. R. Ferron, A. W. Hyatt, A. C. C. Sips
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 1199-1211
Technical Paper | DIII-D Tokamak - Advanced Tokamak Scenarios | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1071
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experiments in the DIII-D tokamak have demonstrated the ability to sustain ELMing H-mode discharges with high beta and good confinement quality under stationary conditions. These experiments have shown the ability to sustain normalized fusion performance (in terms of NH89P /q952) at or above that projected for Qfus = 10 operation in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) design over a wide range in operating parameters. In the best cases, operation is maintained at the free boundary, n = 1 stability limit. Confinement is found to be better than standard H-mode confinement scalings over a wide range in operation space, and experimentally measured transport is consistent with predictions from the GLF23 transport code. Projections using the standard ITER H-mode scaling laws based on these discharges indicate that Qfus = 5 can be maintained for >5400 s in ITER at q95 = 4.5 while Qfus = 40 can be obtained for ~2400 s at q95 = 3.2. These projected performance levels further validate the ITER design and suggest that long-pulse, high neutron fluence operation as well as very high fusion gain operation may be possible in next-generation tokamaks.