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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.
Andrey Ovcharov, Richard Szczepanski, Jacek Kosek, Nuno Pedrosa, Xiaofei Lu, Lorenzo Basili, Rosa Lo Frano, Donato Aquaro
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 3 | April 2020 | Pages 179-190
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1689891
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Operation of the fuel cycle of a thermonuclear fusion reactor naturally leads to accumulation of surplus protium, but in some cases it can also lead to accumulation of surplus deuterium. Both surplus protium and deuterium have to be separated, detritiated, and discharged to the environment, normally passing a final detritiation stage based on either the liquid phase catalytic exchange or water distillation process. The concept of a multicolumn cryogenic distillation (CD) system capable of discharging a time-varying surplus of deuterium is presented in this paper. A model of a CD column based on a UV (internal energy U – volume V) flash formulation and equation of state (EOS) thermodynamic model for hydrogen isotopologue mixtures is also presented at the principal step to a comprehensive model of the isotope separation system. Although fundamental for constant volume systems, the UV formulation of the thermodynamic state has not been widely used in transient simulations; in particular, for distillation dynamics modeling, other approaches are much more common. At the same time, in helium cryogenics the UV formulation has gained wide usage in large-scale dynamic simulations. It is known from the literature that a UV formulation of the distillation problem is very challenging for a numerically stable implementation. To cope with this situation, we present our findings on the sources of numerical instabilities and approaches.