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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott 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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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Smarter waste strategies: Helping deliver on the promise of advanced nuclear
At COP28, held in Dubai in 2023, a clear consensus emerged: Nuclear energy must be a cornerstone of the global clean energy transition. With electricity demand projected to soar as we decarbonize not just power but also industry, transport, and heat, the case for new nuclear is compelling. More than 20 countries committed to tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy forecasts that the country’s current nuclear capacity could more than triple, adding 200 GW of new nuclear to the existing 95 GW by mid-century.
B. P. Chock, T. B. Jones, D. R. Harding
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 2 | August-September 2016 | Pages 206-218
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-215
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The electric-field–assembly technique proposed for making fusion targets uses the electrical force from dielectrophoresis and electrowetting-on-dielectric phenomena to form droplets of oil and water, combine them into an emulsion, and then center one phase inside the surrounding immiscible phase. Forming the water droplet becomes more problematic with the addition of a surfactant, which is needed to stabilize an oil-in-water emulsion. The effect of increasing the amount of surfactant on the droplet-dispensing process is presented, and a mechanism for this behavior is provided.
Increasing the surfactant concentration slows the rate at which surfactant-water droplets are dispensed and increases the variability in the volume of successive droplets. This effect becomes more pronounced near the critical micelle concentration (CMC). Increasing the applied electric field (V > 75 Vrms) improves the dispensing process but decreases the lifetime of the dielectric coatings (for V > 125 Vrms). The stronger electric field forces surfactant molecules to aggregate at the edges of the water droplet where the electrical forces are the greatest. The difficulty of separating a surfactant-laden droplet from the bulk fluid is attributed to the reduced liquid-air surface tension, the lower liquid-substrate surface energy, and a higher disjoining pressure in the thin-film membrane attaching the droplet to the bulk fluid.
The parameters studied include the surfactant concentration (Silwet L-77) from 0 to 0.025 wt% (2.5× the CMC limit), the voltage from 75 to 150 Vrms, and the frequency from 0.1 to 10 kHz.
