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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
K. Y. Watanabe, Y. Suzuki, S. Sakakibara, T. Yamaguchi, Y. Narushima, Y. Nakamura, K. Ida, N. Nakajima, H. Yamada, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 160-175
Chapter 4. MHD | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10803
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the vacuum of the Large Helical Device (LHD), we can change the plasma volume, the aspect ratio, the ellipticity, the rotational transform, and the height of the magnetic hill through the control of the vertical and the qudrupole components of the magnetic field and the helical coil pitch parameter. The two effects of the finite beta on the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) configuration, the magnetic surface torus outward shift and the invasion of the stochastic region into the plasma core, are discussed. The former is qualitatively the same as that by the external vertical field control. According to the comparison between a theoretical prediction in the finite beta and the vacuum field calculation in the vertical field control, the latter effect is strongly affected by the nonaxisymmetric component of the equilibrium current. A theoretical prediction suggests that an MHD equilibrium beta limit different from the conventional one exists due to the lack of the equilibrium force balance in the stochastic region. The key parameters to improve the accuracy of the identification of the MHD equilibrium configuration are shown to be the identification of the toroidal current profile, the anisotropic pressure effect, and the identification of the plasma boundary shape.