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The deadline arrives: Checking in on the Reactor Pilot Program
On May 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the DOE,” which instructed the Department of Energy to create a Reactor Pilot Program (RPP)—a new system in which companies could pursue DOE authorization to build and test their first-of-a-kind nuclear technologies. EO 14301 set an ambitious goal for that program: three reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026.
Jeffrey Doody, Robert Granetz, Damao Yao, William Beck, Lihua Zhou, Zibo Zhou, Lei Cao, Xuan Xia, Rui Vieira, Stephen Wukitch, James Irby
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 582-586
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-928
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) has designed and built a new outer divertor with an ITER-like cooling system. As part of a joint collaboration, the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT performed analyses on the EAST design to determine loading, stresses and deflections due to the eddy currents and halo currents occurring during a disruption. The analysis was done using the finite element program COMSOL using techniques developed at MIT to recreate actual tokamak discharges from measured data. This technique has been used successfully to recreate discharges from Alcator C-Mod, a high field tokamak with TZM tiles at the Plasma Science Fusion Center at MIT, and allows us to recreate the fields for any disruption from the EAST data base. For the new divertor, an upward moving disruption was chosen as the design scenario.
The plasma filament model predicts fields, eddy currents and loads due to a disruption, but the divertor will also be exposed to halo currents. The new EAST divertor borrows its cooling system design from ITER where the plasma facing tungsten tiles are water cooled by a CuCrZr manifold and pipes attached to the tiles. Halo currents traveling down these tubes and crossing the toroidal field will result in large loads in these components, and COMSOL is used to predict the stresses and deflections. The model predicts that the EAST divertor will survive the combined loading due to the eddy and halo currents.