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NN Asks: What hurdles stand in the way of nuclear power’s global expansion?
Jake Jurewicz
Nuclear technology is mature. It provides firm power at scale with minimal externalities and has done so for decades. The core problem isn’t about the technology—it is how the plants are built. Nuclear construction has a well-documented history of cost and schedule overruns. Previous nuclear plants often spent more than twice what was first budgeted, making nuclear among the power technologies with the largest average cost overruns worldwide.
Recent projects illustrate how severe the problem can be. In South Carolina, the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion saw projected costs rise from roughly $10 billion to more than $25 billion before the project was abandoned in 2017, by which time more than $9 billion had already been spent and customers were stuck paying for a site they have yet to benefit from.
Dmitriy Vasilkov, Stanislav Grebenshchikov, Irina Grishina, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Nikolay Kharchev, Alexey Meshcheryakov, Vladimir Stepakhin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 7 | October 2024 | Pages 826-832
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2201165
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The results of experiments on high-temperature plasma confinement in a quasi-stationary fusion facility are presented. The results were obtained on the L-2M stellarator in which superposition of magnetic fields with three-dimensional spatial symmetry is created with the help of external windings. The plasma was created and heated using microwave pulses with a record specific power of 2 to 4 MW/m3. Under these conditions, spontaneous transition processes were observed in a plasma stable with respect to large-scale instabilities, leading to an abrupt increase in energy. High thermal loads on the wall of the vacuum chamber are observed in the area of the helical separatrix, which leads to an increase in the penetration of impurities into the plasma. Plasma energy and confinement time correspond to L-2M single-machine scaling at lower powers while at specific powers above 3 MW/m3, confinement time decreases due to the accumulation of impurities. The research results can be used to develop fusion energy facilities or to simulate astrophysical phenomena.