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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Fusion Science and Technology
July 2025
Latest News
DOE on track to deliver high-burnup SNF to Idaho by 2027
The Department of Energy said it anticipated delivering a research cask of high-burnup spent nuclear fuel from Dominion Energy’s North Anna nuclear power plant in Virginia to Idaho National Laboratory by fall 2027. The planned shipment is part of the High Burnup Dry Storage Research Project being conducted by the DOE with the Electric Power Research Institute.
As preparations continue, the DOE said it is working closely with federal agencies as well as tribal and state governments along potential transportation routes to ensure safety, transparency, and readiness every step of the way.
Watch the DOE’s latest video outlining the project here.
M. Moscardini, S. Pupeschi, Y. Gan, F. A. Hernández, M. Kamlah
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 4 | May 2019 | Pages 283-298
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1565481
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, an in-house thermal–Discrete Element Method (DEM) code, recently developed at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to evaluate the heat transfer in ceramic packed pebble beds, was applied to study the thermal behavior of the breeder beds of the European solid breeder blanket concept. The breeder zone of the helium-cooled pebble bed (HCPB) blanket for the Demonstration (DEMO) reactor was considered as the reference model implementing the same materials, applying the related neutronic heating, and simulating the relevant bed thicknesses. The code was used to evaluate the temperature profile generated by the neutronic heating in the thickness of the breeder bed. A column cutout of packed pebbles bounded by upper and bottom walls, representing the cooling plates of the HCPB, was considered as a representative geometry to carry out the work. The implemented three-dimensional network model evaluates the heat transfer inside packed beds through chains of thermal resistances describing the thermal contacts (particle-particle and particle-wall) occurring in the assembly. Besides thermal transport through the mechanical contact area, thermal transport through the surrounding gas phase is accounted for including the Smoluchowski effect. Sensitivity studies revealed the influence of the operational conditions and the parameters that mainly affect the temperature profile in the bed.