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2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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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.
D. B. Harris, J. H. Pendergrass
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 8 | Number 1 | July 1985 | Pages 1868-1871
Inertial Confinement Fusion Reactor | Proceedings of the Sixth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (San Francisco, California, March 3-7, 1985) | doi.org/10.13182/FST85-A40033
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The cost and efficiency of megajoule-class KrF laser single pulse test facilities have been examined. A baseline design is described which illuminates targets with 5 MJ with shaped 10-ns pulses. The system uses 24 main amplifiers and operates with an optics operating fluence of 4.0 J/cm2. This system has 9.0% efficiency and costs $200/joule. Tradeoff studies indicate that large amplifier modules and high fluences lead to the lowest laser system costs, but that only a 20% cost savings can be realized by going to amplifier modules larger than 200 kJ and/or fluences greater than 4 J/cm2. The role of the megajoule-class single-pulse test facility towards inertial fusion commercialization will also be discussed.