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2025 ANS Annual Conference
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
B. Weyssow
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 2 | March 2002 | Pages 209-215
Transport and Instabilities | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A11963519
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A complete description of a system in equilibrium is provided by the Grand Canonical Distribution. But, systems are generally not in statistical equilibrium. We shall consider the case of an ideal gaz of charged particles. The linear theory of transport determines the 3 × 1 matrix of dissipative fluxes Jˆr namely, the electric current and the electronic and ionic heat fluxes, in terms of a 3 × 1 matrix of thermodynamic forces Xˆ defined by the electric field and the gradient of the densities and temperatures. The components of the 3 × 3 matrix of tensors Lˆrs of the linear flux-force relations define the set of transport coefficients. They are evaluated for an ion-electron magnetized plasma in the framework of the statistical mechanics of charged particles starting from the Landau kinetic equation.
