The State of Idaho and the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) have just agreed to a targeted waiver of the 1995 Settlement Agreement. The agreement established milestones to remove legacy waste at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) site while permitting nuclear energy research and development at the lab.

The waiver will allow critical research on a high burnup spent nuclear fuel cask from a commercial nuclear power plant. This research will provide data to support licensing for the extended storage of spent nuclear fuel at fifty-four nuclear power plants in twenty eight states.

Idaho Governor Brad Little said, “The collaborative effort between the State of Idaho, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Idaho National Laboratory showcases our commitment to advancing nuclear energy research while upholding the goals of the 1995 Settlement Agreement. We are proud to support innovation in nuclear energy that will support national security and energy independence into the future.”

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said, “Idaho National Laboratory is DOE’s lead lab for nuclear energy research and development, and it is critical that we continue to grow this research capacity and maintain American competitiveness. This agreement between the State of Idaho and DOE ensures the lab can continue its cutting-edge research to advance nuclear technology, helping to meet President Trump’s commitment to unleash American energy dominance.”

INL Director John Wagner said, “As the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, we look forward to utilizing our unique facilities and expertise to support this critical national need. We are thankful to the Department of Energy and the state of Idaho for entrusting us with the safe and secure execution of our vital mission.”

Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador said, “This agreement protects Idaho’s interests and supports important research that will strengthen America’s energy security. We’re grateful for the Trump Administration’s work with Idaho to honor the 1995 Settlement Agreement and advance innovation safely and responsibly. Idaho will always protect our land, our people, and our future.”

DOE-Idaho Operations Manager Robert Boston said, “Thanks to the state of Idaho’s foresight, INL will continue to uphold and expand its legacy as the nation’s premier nuclear energy research, development and demonstration laboratory.”

Modern commercial nuclear fuels are more efficient which lowers costs for utilities and their customers. To ensure continued safe storage, the nuclear industry and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission need data to confirm the performance of spent nuclear fuel during long-term storage. This data is crucial to over seventy percent of today’s dry storage facilities, allowing them to renew their licenses and continue safely storing this spent nuclear fuel.

This new waiver will enable INL to address a national need not envisioned when the Settlement Agreement was established three decades ago while supporting the national commitment to energy independence. This research will help support the current U.S. nuclear reactor fleet, which produces nearly twenty percent of the nation’s electricity, and reinforce Idaho’s critical role in supporting the U.S. nuclear industry.

The waiver supports research reactors at American universities. These reactors play an essential role in educating the next generation of nuclear scientists and engineers while enabling vital nuclear research. This waiver also permits the INL to safely manage small amounts of spent nuclear fuel from domestic university reactors which will preserve this crucial national research and talent pipeline. Without this waiver, some universities risk having to shut down their research reactors because of regulatory limits on spent nuclear fuel storage.

Idaho National Laboratory

Physicists have been working to design fusion reactors, technologies that can generate energy via nuclear fusion processes, for decades. The successful construction of commercial fusion reactors relies on the ability to effectively confine charged particles with magnetic fields, because this in turn enables the control of high-energy plasma.

Researchers at Laboratorio Nacional de Fusión–CIEMAT in Madrid have developed a new family of magnetic fields that could be more efficient for confining particles in these devices without the need for complex equipment configurations. Their paper was published in Physical Review Letters. The work could be an important step toward the successful realization of fusion reactors.

José Luis Velasco is the first author of the paper. He said, “In the last years, there have been many initiatives proposing the design and construction of new experimental fusion devices and reactor prototypes. When these projects design the magnetic field that will confine the fusion plasma, practically all of them try to make the field ‘omnigenous.’ The fact that inspired our research is that the fusion community actually knew that it is possible to have magnetic fields that are quite far from being omnigenous but still display good plasma confinement (e.g., the Large Helical Device, an experimental device operating in Japan, and some old and recent numerical experiments in U.S.).”

In recent years, many physicists conducting research on nuclear fusion have focused their attention on omnigenous magnetic fields. Properties of these fields are well-documented. Velasco and his colleagues set about to investigate less understood magnetic fields that could inform the design of future stellarator reactors.

Velasco explained, “Our intuition was that, in these outliers, there was something interesting and useful to be learned about stellarator reactor design”.

In a stellarator, the electric currents passing through the coils generate a magnetic field organized into nested magnetic surfaces in the shape of a deformed doughnut. This magnetic field confines a plasma composed of deuterium and tritium hydrogen isotopes, as well as the charged alpha particles resulting from fusion.

For fusion reactions to occur, the plasma inside the stellarators needs to be hot enough. To raise plasma to these high temperatures, physicists must carefully design the magnetic fields used to confine particles. This process is known as “optimizing the stellarator.

Velasco said, “Optimizing the stellarator to make it omnigenous ensures that the particles that make up the plasma stay, along their trajectories, close to the same magnetic surface. Nevertheless, to achieve omnigenity, it is necessary to optimize the stellarator ‘as a whole.” In our work we have found that similarly good confinement properties are obtained if one ‘splits’ each magnetic surface of the stellarator into several pieces and optimizes each of them separately. Hence the name ‘piecewise omnigenous.’”

Bottom of Form

The approach for optimizing stellarators proposed by Velasco and his colleagues could help to generate optimized magnetic fields for nuclear reactors more effectively. In contrast with previously proposed approaches, it also does not rely on complex plasma configuration and the use of sophisticated coils.

Velasco explained, “Designing and building an omnigenous field is not easy. In some cases, it may require complicated and expensive coils, which could endanger the whole project. An unfortunately extreme example of this was the National Compact Stellarator Experiment. Because there exists a vast variety of piecewise omnigenous magnetic fields, we are hopeful that some of them will be easier and/or cheaper to build.”

The recent work by this team of researchers may contribute to the future design of fusion reactors, by expanding the space of possible reactor configurations.

In their next studies, Velasco and his colleagues intend to systematically assess all the relevant physics properties of the piecewise omnigenous magnetic fields they uncovered, in order to determine whether they could compete with more conventional omnigenous magnetic fields.

Velasco added, “For instance, is the loss of energy due to turbulent processes too strong and how much simpler can we make the coils to comply with the technological requirements of a reactor? Answering these questions will require a lot of work, drawing on the expertise (in several areas: theory, experiment, technology, engineering, etc.) of many colleagues of the National Fusion Laboratory at CIEMAT and of other collaborators abroad.”

Laboratorio Nacional de Fusión–CIEMAT