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ANS joins others in seeking to discuss SNF/HLW impasse
The American Nuclear Society joined seven other organizations to send a letter to Energy Secretary Christopher Wright on July 8, asking to meet with him to discuss “the restoration of a highly functioning program to meet DOE’s legal responsibility to manage and dispose of the nation’s commercial and legacy defense spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).”
Ulrich Fischer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 13 | Number 1 | January 1988 | Pages 143-152
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A25091
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The use of beryllium as a neutron multiplier for fusion reactor blankets has been analyzed. The analysis has been performed based on designs for a helium-cooled ceramic breeder and a self-cooled liquid-metal blanket, which have both been suggested for the Next European Torus reactor. It is shown that the use of beryllium in a ceramic breeder blanket is best in a “sandwich-type” arrangement, where a beryllium block is embedded between a thin ceramic layer and the thick main breeding zone, or in a homogeneous mixture of beryllium and breeding ceramics. The sandwich-type solution needs only a minimum of beryllium inventory. Monte Carlo calculations show that heterogeneity effects in such a blanket are negligible. Therefore, the “homogeneous” solution can be achieved in a more heterogeneous arrangement like slabs of beryllium with the breeding ceramics in between. The use of beryllium also provides a benefit for liquid-metal blankets, using either LiPb or lithium metal as breeding material, since neutron multiplication and the tritium breeding ratio are enhanced in such a way that it is possible to reduce the blanket thickness considerably or to replace the inboard breeding blanket by a simple neutron reflector. It turns out that in such a blanket the use of lithium metal as breeding material is superior to that of LiPb.