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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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The newest era of workforce development at ANS
As most attendees of this year’s ANS Annual Conference left breakfast in the Grand Ballroom of the Chicago Downtown Marriott to sit in on presentations covering everything from career pathways in fusion to recently digitized archival nuclear films, 40 of them made their way to the hotel’s fifth floor to take part in the second offering of Nuclear 101, a newly designed certification course that seeks to give professionals who are in or adjacent to the industry an in-depth understanding of the essentials of nuclear energy and engineering from some of the field’s leading experts.
Masahiro Kinoshita, Yuji Naruse
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 2 | Number 3 | July 1982 | Pages 410-425
Technical Peper | Special Section Contents / Tritum System | doi.org/10.13182/FST82-A20773
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A mathematical simulation procedure is developed for a single cryogenic distillation column with a feedback stream and a catalytic equilibrator used for protium-tritium (HT) separation. Large errors in calculation of mole fractions of the HT in the two products may occur unless special care is taken. Errors are minimized here by solving a single-variable nonlinear equation using the Newton-Raphson method. Parametric investigations of interest for column design and operation are also presented. One result is that the sidestream location is found to strongly affect column performance, and the optimum location depends strongly on the external feed composition. Further, as the mole percentage of HT in the external feed increases, the flow rate of the sidestream must be increased. Finally the effect of thermodynamic properties of the isotopes and of the decay heat of tritium on static column behavior are examined. Differences in the latent heat of vaporization among the three molecular species (H2, HT, and T2) are found to be significant. It appears that consideration of the decay heat of tritium and of the nonideality of the H2-HT-T2 solution is necessary to accurately predict the tritium concentration in the top product of high purity protium, a key output parameter. The usual assumption of equal molal heats and equal molal overflows within the column can lead to error in the reboiler load exceeding +250%.