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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Optimizing nuclear plant outages: Data analytics tools and methods for enhancing resilience and efficiency
Nuclear power plant refueling outages are among the most complex phases in a plant’s operational cycle.1 During these outages, tens of thousands of activities, including maintenance and surveillance, are conducted simultaneously within a short timeframe. Typically lasting three to four weeks, these operations involve large crews of contractors with diverse skill sets performing tasks ranging from testing and surveillance to maintenance. Outages may extend longer if major backfitting or modernization projects are planned. Consequently, plant outages are expensive, incurring significant operational costs, such as contractor labor and equipment, as well as the loss of generation while the plant is off line. This can easily cost a plant operator more than $1 million a day. Therefore, there is a constant need to mitigate the economic impact on plants by reducing the frequency, duration, and risks associated with these outages.2,3
E. Greenspan, Y. Karni
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 1605-1610
Solid Breeder Blanket | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24961
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Possibilities for maximizing the tritium breeding ratio (TBR) and for minimizing the major radius of the Next European Torus (NET) fusion device are investigated using the nucleonic optimization code SWAN. It is found that a NET like device can be designed to be tritium self-sufficient even when tritium breeding is restricted to the outboard blanket, while enabling a 25 cm reduction in the major radius of the device, Additional 20 cm major radius reduction is expected from replacing the conventional steel-water inboard shield by an optimized shield based on a tungsten-copper composite material and titanium-hydride.
