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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.
Mark Newton, Mike Wilson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 34 | Number 3 | November 1998 | Pages 1122-1126
National Ignition Facility-Laser Facilities | doi.org/10.13182/FST98-A11963764
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The National Ignition Facility (NIF), being built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will utilize a 1.8 MJ glass laser to study inertial confinement fusion. This laser will be driven by a power conditioning system which must simultaneously deliver over 260 MJ of electrical energy to the nearly 7700 flashlamps. The power conditioning system is divided into independent modules that store, shape and deliver pulses of energy to the flashlamps.
The NIF power conditioning system which is being designed and built by Sandia National Laboratory (SNL) in collaboration with LLNL and industrial partners, is a different architecture from any laser power conditioning system previously built at LLNL. This particular design architecture was chosen as the most cost-effective way to reliably deliver the large amount of energy needed for NIF.
This paper will describe the development and design of the NIF power conditioning system. It will discuss the design objectives as well as the key design issues and technical hurdles that are being addressed in an ongoing component development and system validation program being supported by both SNL and LLNL.
