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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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Latest News
High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Yoshi Hirooka, Haishan Zhou, Naoko Ashikawa, Takeo Muroga, Akio Sagara
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 345-350
Safety, Environment, and Tritium Handling | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-514
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The first wall of a magnetic fusion power reactor is defined essentially as the plasma-facing walls of blankets. For the high temperature operation of self-cooled breeder blankets, the first wall is often designed to be less than 1cm thick to reduce mechanical stresses and as a result will be subjected to bi-directional hydrogen permeation by two distinctive mechanisms; in one direction by edge plasma-driven and in the other direction by bred tritium gas-driven permeation. Using a laboratory-scale plasma device and a one-dimensional diffusion model, plasma-driven and gas-driven hydrogen permeation behavior has been investigated under some of the conditions relevant to FLiBe-employed blankets. For a 5mm F82H membrane, the plasma-driven permeation flux at ~500 eC and the gas-driven hydrogen permeation flux at ~350 CC have been measured to be of the orders of 1013 H-atoms/cm2/s and 1014 H-atoms/cm2/s, respectively. From these data one predicts that gas-driven permeation could dominate the hydrogen isotope transport through the first wall.
