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Return of the HB Line at SRS
The Department of Energy is bringing the HB Line facility at the Savannah River Site back on line to recycle surplus plutonium and produce uranium-plutonium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel for advanced reactors.
Restarting the facility will be a multiyear process and will yield opportunities for increased domestic production of isotopes with scientific and commercial value. The DOE said that once operational, the HB Line will accelerate the Office of Environmental Management’s plutonium disposition mission by 10 to 13 years while reducing the existing cost.
Adrian S. Sabau, Evan K. Ohriner, Jim Kiggans, Charles R. Schaich, Yoshio Ueda, David C. Harper, Yutai Katoh, Lance L. Snead
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 3 | November 2014 | Pages 394-404
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-809
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Testing of advanced materials and component mock-ups under prototypical fusion high-heat-flux conditions, while historically a mainstay of fusion research, has proved challenging, especially for irradiated materials. A new high-heat-flux–testing (HHFT) facility based on water-wall plasma arc lamps (PALs) is now introduced for materials and small-component testing. Two PAL systems, utilizing a 12 000°C plasma arc contained in a quartz tube cooled by a spiral water flow over the inside tube surface, provide maximum incident heat fluxes of 4.2 and 27 MW/m2 over areas of 9×12 and 1×10 cm2, respectively. This paper will present the overall design and implementation of a PAL-based irradiated material target station (IMTS). The IMTS is primarily designed for testing the effects of heat flux or thermal cycling on material coupons of interest, such as those for plasma-facing components. Temperature results are shown for thermal cycling under HHFT of tungsten coupon specimens that were neutron irradiated in HFIR. Radiological surveys indicated minimal contamination of the 36-× 36-× 18-cm test section, demonstrating the capability of the new facility to handle irradiated specimens at high temperature.