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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
R. W. Margevicius
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 286-295
Technical Paper | Fourteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A17914
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Beryllium is being considered as a possible capsule material for ignition targets for the National Ignition Facility. The material and machining specifications may ned to be highly restrictive, especially with regard to isotropic sound propagation. Beryllium, a hexagonal metal, displays directionally dependent sound speeds due to its anisotropic Young’s modulus. Crystallographic texture transfers this anisotropic sound speed to the polycrystal to varying degrees depending on the texture strength. From published values for the elastic compliances for Be, the value of E for single crystals was seen to vary with azimuthal angle from the c axis, from about 350 GPa parallel to c to about 290 GPa parallel to a. The longitudinal sound velocity varies with E, and experimentally measured velocities on single crystal Be are in good agreement with the derived values. The value of E for polycrystalline Be was calculated from simulated textures ranging from 1 MRD (multiples of random distribution), i.e., random, to 2, 4, 8, 20, and 40 MRD. The difference in sound speed from the fastest to the slowest direction for those textured materials were 0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.9, 3.8, and 5.4 percent respectively. Experimentally measured textures, processed by hot-pressing, swaging, and HIPping, were used to illustrate the effect of process variables on the resulting texture. These types of differences in sound speed have tremendous implications for the manner in which the beryllium used for ignition capsules for the National Ignition Facility is fabricated.