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Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
Copper melting behavior at extreme temperatures could inform fusion materials
Using SLAC’s electron camera, researchers recorded timestamps of solid copper atoms (orange) as they melted (yellow) after being blasted with laser heat. This graphic shows how copper atoms changed over a period of several femtoseconds (millionths of a billionth of a second), notated here as fractions of a picosecond. Instead of the predicted collapse, the researchers saw a gradual melting. (Image: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has announced researchers have conducted experiments testing how copper melts under extreme conditions, such as those it might be exposed to in a fusion machine. The results, published in Nature Communications, found that a copper thin film was more resilient to melting than models had predicted, uncovering molecular dynamics that had been missing from calculations.
“These results greatly improve the simulations we use to predict which materials have the best shot at surviving the extreme conditions of future fusion reaction chambers,” said Mianzhen Mo, the SLAC staff scientist who led the research.
Technical Session|Reactor Design and Analysis
Tuesday, April 23, 2024|10:15AM–12:00PM PDT|Franciscan B
Session Chair:
Ugur Mertyurek (ORNL)
Alternate Chair:
Eva E. Davidson
Session Organizer:
Brendan Kochunas (Univ. Michigan)
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Towards 2D Reference Deterministic Calculations in Support of Industrial Model Verification and Advanced Reflector Modeling Setup
10:15–10:35AM PDT
F. Inzirillo (Politecnico di Milano), A. Brighenti (Framatome), A. Cammi (Politecnico di Milano), L. Graziano (Framatome), A. Hebert (Polytechnique Montréal), G. Marleau (Polytechnique Montréal), S. Santandrea (CEA), B. Vezzoni (Framatome)
Paper
New Thermal and Leakage Synthetic Algorithms Applied to Best Estimate Schemes in Lattice Calculations
10:35–10:55AM PDT
A. Brighenti (Framatome), S. Santandrea (CEA), L. Graziano (Framatome), B. Vezzoni (Framatome)
Enhancing PWR Monte Carlo Simulations with GREAPMC: A GPU-Accelerated Approach
10:55–11:15AM PDT
Muhammad Rizwan Ali (Ulsan Nat'l Institute Science and Technology), Murat Serdar Aygul (Ulsan Nat'l Institute Science and Technology), Deokjung Lee (Ulsan Nat'l Institute Science and Technology)
Enrichment Interpolation for High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium Fuel Macroscopic Cross Section for Polaris/PARCS
11:15–11:35AM PDT
Junsu Kang (Univ. Michigan), Andrew M. Ward (Univ. Michigan), Ugur Mertyurek (ORNL), Thomas J. Downar (Univ. Michigan)
Core Physics Characteristics of Extended Enrichment and Higher Burnup Boiling Water Reactor Fuel
11:35–11:55AM PDT
Ugur Mertyurek (ORNL), Riley Cumberland (ORNL), William A. Wieselquist (ORNL)
