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Fusion Science and Technology
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A series of firsts delivers new Plant Vogtle units
Southern Nuclear was first when no one wanted to be.
The nuclear subsidiary of the century-old utility Southern Company, based in Atlanta, Ga., joined a pack of nuclear companies in the early 2000s—during what was then dubbed a “nuclear renaissance”—bullish on plans for new large nuclear facilities and adding thousands of new carbon-free megawatts to the grid.
In 2008, Southern Nuclear applied for a combined construction and operating license (COL), positioning the company to receive the first such license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2012. Also in 2008, Southern became the first U.S. company to sign an engineering, procurement, and construction contract for a Generation III+ reactor. Southern chose Westinghouse’s AP1000 pressurized water reactor, which was certified by the NRC in December 2011.
Fast forward a dozen years—which saw dozens of setbacks and hundreds of successes—and Southern Nuclear and its stakeholders celebrated the completion of Vogtle Units 3 and 4: the first new commercial nuclear power construction project completed in the U.S. in more than 30 years.
H. Reimerdes, R. J. Buttery, A. M. Garofalo, Y. In, R. J. La Haye, M. J. Lanctot, M. Okabayashi, J.-K. Park, M. J. Schaffer, E. J. Strait, F. A. Volpe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 3 | April 2011 | Pages 572-585
Lecture | Fourth ITER International Summer School (IISS2010) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11698
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tokamak plasmas can be sensitive to external nonaxisymmetric magnetic perturbations that are several orders of magnitude smaller than the axisymmetric field. These perturbations, which are usually undesired and are referred to as error fields, can limit operation by braking the plasma rotation until an instability such as a tearing mode, a resistive wall mode, or an error field-driven locked mode leads to an unacceptable confinement degradation or a disruption. Auxiliary heating can have two competing effects: On one hand higher leads to a degradation of the error field tolerance through plasma amplification and stronger braking, and on the other hand higher toroidal rotation can tolerate a higher magnetic braking torque. A widely used technique to detect and correct error fields is based on the characteristic density dependence of the error field tolerance in ohmic plasmas. An alternative technique is based on the measurable plasma amplification of the error field in high- plasmas. However, the detection and correction of error fields in ITER will require a modification of the present techniques in order to avoid disruptions and deal with insufficient plasma amplification of the error field at low , before the full set of auxiliary heating systems will be available. The adaptation of current techniques to address these concerns is likely, but an experimental demonstration as well as an improved physics basis is needed and remains the subject of current research.