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Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
C. R. Walthers, E. M. Jenkins, D. W. Sedgley, T. H. Batzer, S. Konishi, S. O'Hira, Y. Naruse
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1811-1813
Impurity Control and Plasma-Facing Component | Proceedings of the Ninth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Oak Brook, Illinois, October 7-11, 1990) | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29606
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In 1988, a prototypical vacuum system was added to the Tritium Systems Test Assembly (TSTA) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Since then various pumping scenarios, which might be expected in a fusion reactor, have been performed without any serious shortcomings being apparent in the use of compound cryopumps as reactor high vacuum pumps. Last year, the question of whether a compound pump was necessary was addressed in a pair of runs in which deuterium helium mixtures were pumped on a single 4K activated charcoal panel. In these tests, the condensing stage of the pump was maintained at 77K and did not contribute to pumping either deuterium or helium. Results were very encouraging: in both tests the charcoal readily pumped helium until a max loading of 0.4 T 1 cm−2 of helium on charcoal was attained. Helium speed was not affected by deuterium which may have been pumped by either a condensing or sorbing mechanism or by a combination of both. In addition, the helium loading at saturation was 0.4 T 1 cm−2 even though the D2/He ratio was doubled between runs. Conjecture about why the charcoal helium capacity was constant led to the pump operation described in this paper. It was felt that measurement of helium capacity after careful deuterium preloads might help to explain the mechanism involved in co-pumping of a condensible and a noncondensible on a single 4K cryosorber surface. This paper presents the results of series of helium capacity runs preceded by a range of deuterium preloads and attempts to explain the mechanism involved.