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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
NRC completes environmental review of Dresden SLR
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found that the environmental impacts of renewing the operating license of the Dresden nuclear power plant outside Chicago, Ill., for an additional 20 years are not great enough to prohibit doing so.
B. J. Kozioziemski, E. R. Mapoles, J. D. Sater, A. A. Chernov, J. D. Moody, J. B. Lugten, M. A. Johnson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 14-25
Technical Paper | Nineteenth Target Fabrication Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-3697
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial confinement fusion requires very smooth and uniform solid deuterium-tritium (D-T) fuel layers. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) point design calls for a 65- to 75-m-thick D-T fuel layer inside of a 2-mm-diam spherical ablator shell to be 1.5 K below the D-T melting temperature (Tm) of 19.79 K. We find that the layer quality depends on the initial crystal seeding, with the best layers grown from a single seed. The low modes of the layer are controlled by thermal shimming of the hohlraum and meet the NIF requirement with beryllium shells and nearly meet the requirement with plastic shells. The remaining roughness is localized in grain-boundary grooves and is minimal for a single crystal layer. Once formed, the layers need to be cooled to Tm - 1.5 K. We have studied dependence of the roughness on the cooling rate and found that cooling at rates of 0.03 to 0.5 K/s is able to preserve the layer structure for a few seconds after reaching the desired temperature. The entire fuel layer remains in contact with the shell during this rapid cooling. Thus, rapid cooling of the layers is able to satisfy the NIF ignition requirements.