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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Strong performances across the board
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
Another year, another stellar performance by America’s nuclear plants. We’ve come to expect high capacity factors, and it’s a credit to the men and women of the profession. They’ve made routine something that was unimaginable not so long ago.
The decadal challenge for the nuclear enterprise now is to maintain this high level of operational excellence for the current fleet, while at the same time ushering in a new generation of technologies at scale. It will be a big job—but one that seems more and more likely with each passing day.
Igor Peñalva, Gustavo A. Esteban, Natalia Alegría, Jon Azkurreta, María Urrestizala, Marta Malo, Belit Garcinuño, David Rapisarda
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | May 2024 | Pages 596-606
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2194237
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The determination of the transport parameters of the hydrogen isotopes in the eutectic lead-lithium (PbLi) alloy represents a key issue for the design of the different breeding blanket systems that are being developed based on this liquid metal. This is the case for the dual-coolant lithium-lead blanket where the values of the Sieverts’ constant and diffusivity will delimit the magnitude and the kinetics of the induced tritium flux produced by the breeding blanket toward the circuit of He for the refrigeration of the structures. In addition, the design (sizing and efficiency) of future tritium extraction systems of the breeding alloy or the He coolant purification system will be defined on the basis of these transport parameters.
Taking into account the current literature, there exists a very wide band (even more than three orders of magnitude) in the experimental results for the Sieverts’ constant obtained by different research groups using different experimental techniques. This dispersion band in terms of solubility is not acceptable from the point of view of the design of a breeding blanket for a fusion reactor. With the aim of reducing this dispersion of results, the Absorption-Desorption facility available at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) has been upgraded and new samples of high quality PbLi will be measured in the near future in collaboration with CIEMAT.
In this work, a complete theoretical model is described for the interaction between isotopes of hydrogen and the eutectic PbLi sample considering the particular boundary conditions for the absorption and desorption processes. This model has been specifically developed for the upgraded Absorption-Desorption facility available at the UPV/EHU, according to the new configuration of the experimental chamber made of glass and quartz and the geometry of the crucible made of tungsten that is designed to hold the PbLi sample. Three different phases are described (loading, pumping, and release) together with the boundary conditions that have been taken into account in each one. This way, different mathematical expressions for the concentration profile of the isotopes of hydrogen through the PbLi sample are posed for each phase so that the experimental measurements to be carried out in the upgraded Absorption-Desorption facility will be fitted to them, and as a result, the transport parameters will be obtained.