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Fusion Science and Technology
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Latest News
Modernizing I&C for operations and maintenance, one phase at a time
The two reactors at Dominion Energy’s Surry plant are among the oldest in the U.S. nuclear fleet. Yet when the plant celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023, staff could raise a toast to the future. Surry was one of the first plants to file a subsequent license renewal (SLR) application, and in May 2021, it became official: the plant was licensed to operate for a full 80 years, extending its reactors’ lifespans into 2052 and 2053.
H. L. Wilkens, J. Gunther, M. P. Mauldin, A. Nikroo, J. R. Wall, D. R. Wall, R. J. Wallace
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 4 | May 2006 | Pages 846-850
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1212
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The process of making multi-layered depleted uranium (DU) and gold "cocktail" hohlraums is being developed in a sputter-coater designed and assembled at General Atomics. These elements have been chosen to increase the hohlraum wall albedo, targeting the composition that results in the highest hohlraum efficiency. Rather than co-sputtering the cocktail constituents as was done previously, the approach taken in this work is to sputter alternating multiple thin layers of DU and gold. The intended outcome of creating a multi-layered structure is to encapsulate the DU in gold, thus reducing or perhaps preventing rapid oxidation of uranium, a known problem in the co-sputtered materials. Residual stress in coatings has been reduced to sufficiently low levels by optimizing deposition pressure allowing fabrication of free-standing cylinders and foils. Characterization of this type of sandwich material is difficult due to the fact that the cocktail region consists of buried interfaces, though promising results from Auger depth profiling show that the materials have sufficiently low oxygen content (4 at. %) as well as the targeted composition.