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NN Asks: What does it take to build a domestic fuel salt supply chain?
Adam Burak
We need facilities capable of converting uranium and thorium feedstocks into salts, as well as a source of thorium, if we are to build a domestic fuel salt supply chain.
Our current supply chain provides a potential pathway to produce one type of fuel salt. The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory used uranium trifluoride/uranium tetrafluoride (UF3/4) as fuel in the late 1960s, and some current developers are following suit. Uranium hexafluoride (UF6) made as part of the enrichment process could be reduced to uranium fluoride salts with a +3 or +4 valence state. However, as oxygen and moisture are critical impurities for molten salt, a facility with the capability to properly handle molten salts would be necessary.
A. Robinson, L. El-Guebaly, D. Henderson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 720-724
Nuclear Analysis & Experiments | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12470
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Every few years, maintenance will be required to replace the plasma facing components of any fusion power plant. To come up with a realistic maintenance scheme, an accurate method of evaluating the biological dose rate is needed. In some studies, the simple and quick approach of the contact dose rate for a specific component was used to estimate the biological dose rate. This method doesn't take radiation from nearby components into account and the accuracy of its methodology is questionable. The more accurate multi-step method, which involves transporting the delayed gammas from induced activation in the forward or adjoint mode, is able to take radiation from all surrounding components into account. In this report, the biological dose rate was evaluated with the adjoint method at selected radial locations of ARIES-CS, and then compared to the contact dose rate of the nearest component to determine the accuracy of the contact dose method. Our results indicate that the approximate contact dose rate could be off by an order of magnitude.