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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
EPA issues final rule regulating “forever chemicals”
The Environmental Protection Agency announced that it will issue a rule aimed at limiting public exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The final rule will designate two widely used PFAS chemicals, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), as hazardous substances under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as Superfund.
According to the EPA, both PFOA and PFOS meet the statutory criteria for designation as hazardous substances.
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.