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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
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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May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Fernando R. Urgorri, Carlos Moreno, Elisabetta Carella, Jesús Castellanos, Alessandro Del Nevo, Ángel Ibarra
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 444-449
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2016.1273712
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Water Cooled Lithium Lead (WCLL) blanket is one of the four breeder blanket technologies under consideration within the framework of the EUROfusion Consortium activities. The aim of this work is to develop a preliminary model that can track tritium concentration and tritium fluxes along each part of the WCLL blanket and its ancillary systems at any time.
Because of tritium’s nature, the phenomena of diffusion, dissociation, recombination and solubilization have been taken into account when describing the tritium behavior inside the lead-lithium channels, the structural materials and the water coolant circuits. The simulations have been performed using the object oriented modeling software EcosimPro.
Results have been obtained for the pulsed generation scenario of the European demonstration power plant (DEMO). The tritium inventory in every part of the blanket has been computed. Permeation rates have been calculated as well allowing to know how much tritium ends up in the coolant system and how much remains in the liquid metal. The amount of tritium extracted from the lead-lithium loop has been also obtained. All this information allows having a global perspective of tritium behavior all over the blanket at any time.
The model provides valuable information for the design of the WCLL blanket. More complex upgrades are planned to be implemented based on this model in future stages of the EUROfusion project.