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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
Jan S. Brzosko, Benjamin V. Robouch, Raffaele De Leo, Ginevra D'Erasmo, Ambrogio Pantaleo, Gigi Skoff, Marisa Alessio, Lucia Allegri, Salvatore Improta
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 2 | September 1986 | Pages 253-265
Technical Paper | Tritium System | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24977
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Advanced Benchmark Experiment (ABE) is a new step in benchmark experiments of fusion reactor technology aimed at examining the effects of non-homogeneities due to the discretization of the reactor blanket into breeder and coolant (confined within stainless tube), as well as to openings in the blanket for vacuum pumping, plasma heating, etc. The organization of the openings and any discretization significantly alter local nuclear parameters, particularly the local tritium breeding ratio (LTBR). Prior to designing an ABE, the practical limits of the quality of the experiment should be established and compared with the expected possibilities of numerical calculations. A study of the state of the art in LTBR measurements is presented. The neutron fluence is measured by the charged associated particle method with the use of ΔE- and E- silicon detectors. The tritium activity induced through nuclear transmutations of lithium isotopes is measured by a very advanced coincidence-anticoincidence system on direct mixtures of LiNO3 water solution and ATOM-LIGHT scintillator (the considered indicator mass is 0.1 g of LiNO3). The experimental results complemented by 3DAMC-VINIA code calculations reveal that in ABEs it is very realistic to expect 3.2% of maximal systematic error, and a statistical error ≅1.5% on LTBR measurements is achievable in most of a hollow sphere (R = 56 cm, r = 20 cm); this can be achieved with 9 days of an accelerator beam (Ed = 0.3 MeV, id = 0.5 mA).
