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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
J. E. Klein, M. K. Mailory, A. Nobile, Jr.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 21 | Number 2 | March 1992 | Pages 401-405
Safety; Measurement and Accountability; Operation and Maintenance; Application | doi.org/10.13182/FST92-A29778
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the new technologies that has been introduced to the Savannah River Site (SRS) is the production scale use of metal hydride technology to store, pump, and compress hydrogen isotopes. For tritium stored in metal hydride storage beds, a unique relationship does not exist between the amount of tritium in the bed and the pressure-volume-temperature properties of the hydride material. Determining the amount of tritium in a hydride bed after desorbing the contents of the bed to a tank and performing pressure, volume, temperature, and composition (PVTC) measurements is not practical due to long desorption/absorption times and the inability to remove tritium “heels” from the metal hydride materials under normal processing conditions. To eliminate the need to remove tritium from hydride storage beds for measurement purposes, an “in-bed” tritium calorimetric measurement technique has been developed. The steady-state temperature rise of a gas stream flowing through a jacketed metal hydride storage bed is measured and correlated with power input to electric heaters used to simulate the radiolytic power generated by the decay of tritium to 3He. Temperature rise results for prototype metal hydride storage beds and the effects of using different gases in the bed are shown. Linear regression results shows that for 95% confidence intervals, temperature rise measurements can be obtained in 14 hours and have an accuracy of ± 1.6% of a tritium filled hydride storage bed.