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Chernobyl at 40 years: Looking back at Nuclear News
Sunday, April 26, at 1:23 a.m. local time will mark 40 years since the most severe nuclear accident in history: the meltdown of Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
In the ensuing four decades, countless books, documentaries, articles, and conference sessions have examined Chernobyl’s history and impact from various angles. There is a similar abundance of outlooks in the archives of Nuclear News, where hundreds of scientists, advocates, critics, and politicians have shared their thoughts on Chernobyl over the years. Today, we will take a look at some highlights from the pages of NN to see how the story of Chernobyl evolved over the decades.
Marco Riva, Alice Ying, Mohamed Abdou, Mu-Young Ahn, Seungyon Cho
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 1037-1045
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1643691
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, dynamic tritium flow rates and inventories of the outer fuel cycle (OFC) of a DEMOnstration nuclear fusion reactor (DEMO) are analyzed to determine the initial amount of tritium that has to be prepared to sustain plasma operation at reactor start-up, i.e., until tritium bred in blankets is extracted and available. The main components of the helium coolant ceramic reflector tritium breeding system were modeled in detail with the use of COMSOL Multiphysics and integrated into a system-level model within the MATLAB/Simulink platform to simulate OFC tritium streams. Furthermore, a control volume analysis was derived to incorporate the OFC flow rates calculated with the dynamic integrated numerical tool for initial start-up tritium inventory (ISTI) analysis. We found that the tritium processing time of the tritium extraction system (TES) plays a critical role for ISTI assessment. On one hand, for batchwise technology such as adsorption/regeneration columns, the OFC-attributed ISTI is ~2.6 kg calculated for a 3-GW fusion power reactor. On the other hand, online extraction techniques such as catalytic membrane reactors offer continuous operation and result in ~10 to 250 g of ISTI depending on the TES efficiency and breeder material tritium residence time. The helium coolant system (HCS) line has a minor impact on ISTI since tritium retention in HCS components is orders of magnitude lower than the TES line when a tungsten plasma-facing-component coating is implemented.