The South Oxfordshire District Council Planning Committee has just granted planning permission for the construction of General Fusion’s Demonstration Plant (GFPD) at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s (UKAEA’s) Culham Campus near Oxford. Construction is expected to start later this year. The UKAEA website says that it “researches fusion energy and related technologies, with the aim of positioning the UK as a leader in sustainable nuclear energy.”
     General Fusion is based in Canada. Its Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) approach involves the injection of hydrogen plasma into a sphere of liquid metal. The plasma is compressed and heated so that fusion can occur. The heat from the fusion of the hydrogen atoms is transferred into the liquid metal. Then that heat is used to generate steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. The company intends to construct a commercial nuclear fusion energy plant by the late 2020s.
     The demonstration plant will be used to verify the viability of the MTF technology. The demonstration plant will be a seventy percent-scaled version of the commercial pilot plant. It will create fusion conditions in a “power-plant relevant” environment. Temperatures of more than a hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit will be achieved. However, the plant will not be used to actually produce power. The GFPD will cycle one plasma pulse per day. It will use deuterium fuel. The commercial pilot plant will use deuterium-tritium fuel and will cycle up to one plasma pulse per second.
    When construction of the one hundred and thirteen thousand square feet building is complete, General fusion will rent the building from UKAEA. The company’s fusion reactor is expected to be commissioned in 2026 and fully operational by early 2027.
     General Fusion said that siting the facility at the UKAEA’s Culham Campus allows it to “access world-leading science and engineering capabilities, such as knowledge and experience in designing, constructing and operating the record-breaking Joint European Torus”. In addition, the company expects to benefit from the U.K.’s existing fusion energy supply chains.
     Greg Twinney is the CEO of General Fusion. He said, “We are thrilled to join the Culham Campus and the UK’s Fusion Cluster and anticipate creating 60 long-term jobs at the site. In addition, we expect the project will generate approximately 200 jobs during construction.”
      Ian Chapman is the CEO of UKAEA. He said, “The UKAEA welcomes this milestone as it aligns with our strategy to create clusters that accelerate innovation in fusion and related technologies, and support public-private partnerships to thrive. It also builds upon our heritage of hosting major fusion facilities here at our Culham Campus.”
     The UKAEA carries out fusion energy research on behalf of the U.K.  government. It oversees the country’s fusion program. This included the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) Upgrade experiment. They also host the Joint European Torus at Culham, which is operated for scientists from around Europe.
     UKAEA is developing its own fusion power plant design. It plans to build a prototype known as the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) at West Burton in Nottinghamshire. The STEP is due to begin operating by 2040.

Ambient office = 85 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 110 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 4 nanosieverts per hour

Iceberg lettuce from Central Market = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 81 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 70 nanosieverts per hour

     Last week, the news was full of announcements that an MIT startup had successfully tested a massive magnet that could allow them to achieve “net energy” with their nuclear fusion reactor. This week, scientists at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being constructed in France announced that they have received the first part of another giant magnet. The magnet is so powerful that its U.S. manufacturer claims that it could lift an aircraft carrier. When the new magnet is fully assembled, it will be almost sixty feet tall and fourteen feet in diameter. Experts say that it could be the key to providing practically limitless energy via nuclear fusion.
     Nuclear fusion utilizes the same reaction seen in the Sun and other stars to produce energy. Current cutting-edge technology is being developed to allow scientist to safely collide light atoms together to form a heavier atomic nucleus while also releasing huge amounts of energy. The main problem faced by today’s researchers is that fusion reactors expend much more energy controlling and stabilizing the burning plasma required for the reaction than the energy it produces.
     That is the reason why scientists are developing incredibly power-efficient and powerful magnets. The less power these magnets require, the closer scientist will be to achieving the “net energy” they seek from nuclear fusion. U.S.-based General Atomics shipped a component of its “central solenoid” superconducting magnet from San Diego to France this summer. Laban Coblentz is a spokesman for ITER. He said, “Each completion of a major first-of-a-kind component — such as the central solenoid’s first module — increases our confidence that we can complete the complex engineering of the full machine.” The magnet includes huge coils that weigh over two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.
     ITER is now about seventy five percent complete. Scientists behind the project have established a goal for starting the reactor by 2026. Ultimately, the scientists intend to produce ten times more energy by 2035 than is required to power the fusion reactor.
     ITER scientists are involved in an international race against other research organizations, both public and private, to develop commercial nuclear fusion. The MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) mentioned above have stated that they might have their first functional fusion power plant, called ARC, operating in the early 2030s. First they will have to use their new magnet in an experimental Tokamak fusion reactor called SPARC. Neither ITER nor SPARC will be used commercially. Instead, they will serve as experimental platforms aimed at proving the viability of commercial nuclear fusion.
     The ITER project is an international collaboration which is funded by the governments of most of the countries in Europe, as well as the U.S., Russia, China, Japan, India and South Korea. If ITER is successful, all of these participating countries will benefit from the intellectual property generated by the experiments. ITER’s success would greatly enhance the global community’s ability to reduce carbon emissions. This is a necessary requirement if we wish to turn the tide on the ongoing climate change crisis.

Ambient office = 798 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 116 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 116 nanosieverts per hour

Grape from Central Market = 121 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 90 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 66 nanosieverts per hour

      Doosan Enerbility of South Korea and NAC International of the U.S. have designed a new metal cask for storing spent nuclear fuel that has received design certification from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
      The new cask is called the Metal Storage Overpack (MSO)-37. It can hold thirty-seven pressurized water reactor (PWR) spent nuclear fuel assemblies. A ceremony was held to mark NRC approval at NAC’s corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.  Changyeol Cho, Vice President of Doosan Enerbility’s Nuclear Business Group, and Kent Cole, President and CEO of NAC International were among the attendees.
      The MSO was conceptualized by the NAC and Doosan Enerbility for international applications. It is an alternative to concrete storage systems for the Korea Dry Cask Storage industry. The Doosan Enerbility and NAC teams cooperatively designed and engineered the new cask. In December 2019, NAC filed an amendment application with NRC for design certification. It is the world’s first metal storage cask to have obtained design certification from the NRC.
     NAC said that the NRC approval is an MSO option of its Magnastor dry cask storage system technology. It is “the first and most widely deployed ultra-high-capacity canister system installed at US PWR commercial nuclear power plants”. To date, two hundred and eleven Magnastor systems have been loaded and are in service to safely store spent nuclear fuel at operating and shutdown sites.
     NAC said, “Compared with conventional concrete storage casks, this newly-developed metal storage cask provides robust radiation shielding and structural integrity, significantly reduces the diameter of the cask, thereby optimizing the storage cask’s footprint in dry storage facilities, which in turn allows storage of more casks in the same locality.”
      Doosan Enerbility said that the MSO-37 was developed to take into account “the characteristics of spent nuclear fuel, facility operation environments, and public demand for rigorous safety and radiation protection standards in Korea”.
      Jongdoo Kim is the Head of Doosan Energility’s Nuclear Business Group. He said, “With the technical capabilities recently acquired from the development and licensing experience of the metal storage cask, we plan to actively participate in spent nuclear fuel dry storage projects in the domestic market and to also contribute to the future development of casks designed for permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel.”
      Jongdoo added that “Based on our supply chain built with the leading local manufacturers, we are set to actively target the global nuclear cask market and will do our utmost to promote growth of the nuclear energy ecosystem and overseas exports.” 
     In October 2015, Doosan and NAC announced that they were signing a cooperation agreement for the joint development of a spent nuclear fuel storage system to be deployed in Korea.
     In 2017, Doosan completed development of the DSS-21. It is a dry storage system that has the capacity to safely store as many as twenty one spent nuclear fuel assemblies. Since then, the DSS-24 and DSS-32 with larger storage capacities were developed. The DPC-24 was also developed. It is a cask that can be used for both storage and transportation of spent nuclear fuel.
     In 2021, Doosan became the first Korean company to export spent nuclear fuel storage casks to the U.S. They supplied five sets of a vertical concrete cask to the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

Ambient office = 92 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 10 nanosieverts per hour

English cucumber from Central Market = 86 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     Mayer pointed out the NRC’s EIS, and a section that said while there could be up to thirteen accidents amid the shipments, the likelihood of them being severe was “one in ten trillion.” Even in a severe accident the NRC “concluded no release of (spent nuclear fuel) would occur,” according to the EIS.
     Mayer went on to say that “Unsubstantiated is that an accident will harm human health and the environment. It seems disingenuous. If you’re going to put a poll together, it should be a substantiated question. The opposition said each of those accidents will cause a release of radioactive material. That’s just not the case.”
     Opponents, including Southwest Research maintained the project would bring an undue risk to New Mexicans nearby and Americans along the waste transportation routes. That is why opposition was spread across political parties, gender, and ethnicity according to Don Hancock, Nuclear Waste Program Manager at Southwest Research.
     The poll indicated that over half of those surveyed in the region were against the project. Political affiliation had no effect on the poll results. About seventy percent of Democrats opposed Holtec. Fifty one percent of Republicans and fifty five percent of Independents opposed the project.
     When broken down by gender, more men supported the project than women. A majority of Republican men polled were supportive of the project at fifty one percent. Sixty one percent of Republican women were against the project.
     White men were mostly supportive of the project at forty nine percent of those polled while seventy one percent of white women were opposed. Hispanic men and women mostly opposed the project at fifty-one and seventy-eight percent against. Central, northeast and southwest N.M. showed opposition of sixty percent or more. More conservative regions of the southeast and northwest showed fifty-seven and fifty-six percent against, respectively.
     Hancock said that the poll showed that temporary spent nuclear fuel storage was not supported by N.M. voters. He argued that it was opposed through decades of proposals like Holtec’s. He added that, “I’m not surprised by the results because for more than 45 years New Mexicans have strongly opposed high-level waste in New Mexico, whether the waste is proposed for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the 1970s and ‘80s, for Mescalero Apache land in the 1990s, or by Holtec.”
     Opposition to the Holtec proposal also came from some of N.M.’s highest-ranking state officials and its Congressional delegation. N.M. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham called the proposal “economic malpractice.” She pointed out that it would endanger nearby oil and gas and agricultural industries.
     U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) co-sponsored a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate last year to block any federal funds from the supporting such a project. At the state level, N.M. Senator Jeff Steinborn (D-36) was a major opponent of Holtec in the Legislature. Texas lawmakers recently passed a bill to ban high-level waste storage in their state. Steinborn said that N.M. policymakers should considers a similar measure to prevent the project from coming to fruition.
    Steinborn said, “From the very beginning this has been a dangerous plan pushed on New Mexico, with real risks for all of our communities, and no end in sight. It’s time for this project to be canceled and be replaced by the federal government committing to a true consent-based siting process for the permanent storage of this waste.”