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Fusion Science and Technology
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Demolition starts at ORNL’s Isotope Row
The Department of Energy reported last week that the demolition of Isotope Row at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has begun. The demolition work follows six years of targeted decontamination efforts and is expected to be completed by the end of this year.
Isotope Row is a group of 10 facilities constructed at ORNL between the late 1940s and early 1960s for the production of radioisotopes that were used in medical, industrial, scientific, and defense applications. Isotope production stopped in the early 1990s, leaving behind buildings with contaminated ventilation systems, hot cells, and other equipment requiring specialized cleanup operations and teardown.
Satoshi Fukada, Makoto Ueda, Takaaki Izumi, Go Wu, Kazunari Katayama
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 4 | May 2012 | Pages 282-289
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13581
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This research is performed to determine how gaseous impurities affect the evacuation of tritium from a fusion reactor chamber by using a cryosorption pump. The amounts of H2O and CH4 remaining on activated carbon during repeated cycles between adsorption for evacuation and desorption for regeneration are related to the partial pressures of the H2O and CH4 and to temperature and are correlated in terms of Henry's law. It is experimentally investigated how the impurities remaining on the activated carbon after rough evacuation by elevating the temperature affect the adsorption of H2 and He at cryogenic temperature. The amount of CH4 remaining on activated carbon is smaller than that of H2O, and it was found that the former's effect is comparatively smaller than the latter's. Discussion is made based on the surface coverage and pore distribution that are determined by the BET measurement. An important conclusion is that the bulk of the H2O and CH4 can be released from activated carbon by heating to 373 K.