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FERC rejects interconnection deal for Talen-Amazon data centers
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has denied plans for Talen Energy to supply additional on-site power to an Amazon Web Services’ data center campus from the neighboring Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.
Robert L. Bieri
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 752-757
Inertial Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29435
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The SAFIRE (Systems Analysis for ICF Reactor Economics) code was adapted to model a power plant using a HYLIFE-II reactor chamber. The code was then used to examine the dependence of the plant capital costs and the busbar cost of electricity (COE) on a variety of design parameters (type of driver, chamber repetition rate, and net electric power). The results show the most attractive operating space for each set of driver/target assumptions and quantify the benefits of improvements in key design parameters. The basecase plant was a 1,000-MWe plant containing a reactor vessel driven by an induction linac heavy-ion accelerater, run at 8 Hz with a driver energy of 6.73 MJ and a target yield of 350 MJ. The total direct cost for this plant was $2.6 billion. (All costs in this paper are given in equivalent 1988 dollars.) The COE was 8.5 ¢/(kW·h). The COE and total capital costs for a 1,000-MWe base plant are nearly independent of the chosen combination of repetition rate and driver energy for a driver operating between 4 and 10 Hz. For comparison, the COE for a coal or future fission plant would be 4.5–5.5 ¢/(kW·h). The COE for a 1,000-MWe plant could be reduced to 7.5 ¢/(kW·h) by using advanced targets and could be cut to 6.5 ¢/(kW·h) with conventional targets, if the driver cost could be cut in half. There is a large economy of scale with heavy-ion-driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF) plants. A 2,000-MWe plant with a heavy-ion driver and a HYLIFE-II chamber would have a COE of only 5.8 ¢/(kW·h).