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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Fusion Science and Technology
February 2024
Latest News
Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
J. L. Weaver et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 194-200
IFE | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18076
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent designs for laser driven, direct drive inertial confinement fusion (ICF) indicate that substantial gains (G>100) might be achieved with lower total laser energy (E~500 kJ) than previously considered possible. A leading contender is the shock ignition approach which compresses low aspect ratio pellets with high intensity laser pulses (1015 W/cm2) before achieving ignition with a final higher intensity spike (1016 W/cm2). Excimer laser systems based on a krypton-fluoride (KrF) medium are particularly well suited to these new ideas as they operate in the ultraviolet (248 nm), provide highly uniform illumination, possess large bandwidth (1-3 THz), and can easily exploit beam zooming to improve laser-target coupling for the final spike pulse. This paper will examine target physics advantages of KrF lasers in relation to the new implosion designs and the balancing of hydrodynamic instability and laser-plasma instabilities. Supporting experimental and theoretical studies of are being conducted by the Nike laser group at the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory. Recent experimental work has also shown that the high ablation pressures and smooth profiles obtained with the Nike laser can be used to accelerate planar targets to velocities consistent with the requirements of impact ignition.