ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2026
Nuclear Technology
September 2026
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|Environmental Chemistry
Tuesday, September 10, 2024|3:00–3:40PM EDT|Colonial Ballroom
Session Chair:
Nina Huittinen
Alternate Chair:
Kiel S. Holliday
Session Organizer:
Jason R. Jeffries
To access paper attachments, you must be logged in and registered for the meeting.
Register NowLog In
Influence of Groundwater Residence Time on In-situ Migration of U-233, Np-237, Pu-242 and Am-243 at the Grimsel Test Site (Switzerland)
3:00–3:20PM EDT
F. Quinto (Karlsruhe Institute for Technology), I. Blechschmidt (NAGRA), H. Geckeis (Karlsruhe Institute for Technology), B. Lanyon (Fracture Systems), C. Marquardt (Karlsruhe Institute for Technology), U. Noseck (GRS), M. Plaschke (Karlsruhe Institute for Technology), R. Schneeberger (NAGRA), T. Schaefer (Friedrich-Schiller-Univ. Jena)
Paper
Influence of Mineral Complexity on Plutonium Sorption and Reduction
3:20–3:40PM EDT
Manuel R. Vejar (Univ. Notre Dame), Frances E. Zengotita (Univ. Notre Dame), Sharon Bone (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource), Kristina O. Kvashnina (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility), Amy E. Hixon (Univ. Notre Dame)
