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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
T. Venhaus, J. Poths
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 601-604
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Materials Interaction and Permeation | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A997
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have hydrided thin (500 nm) films of Er with tritium to a stoichiometry of ErT2, and have been observing their 3He release characteristics at very low 3He/Er ratios. The films are stored in vacuum-tight metal containers and sampled on a timescale ranging from a day to several months. Analysis is performed with very high sensitivity using static noble gas mass spectrometry. For the first several years, 3He release is a fairly constant function of helium generation, and does not depend on the amount of helium accumulated in the film. There appears to be somewhat higher helium release at very early times (up to 2%), decreasing over 6 months to a fairly flat value (0.7%). This observation is consistent with a bubble nucleation and growth mechanism. The very early release behavior does not appear to be dependent upon the presence or growth of surface oxide layers.
