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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Deep geologic repository progress—2025 Update
Editor's note: This article has was originally published in November 2023. It has been updated with new information as of June 2025.
Outside my office, there is a display case filled with rock samples from all over the world. It contains a disk of translucent, orange salt from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; a core of white-and-bronze gneiss from the site of the future deep geologic repository in Eurajoki, Finland; several angular chunks of fine-grained, gray claystone from the underground research laboratory at Bure, France; and a piece of coarse-grained granite from the underground research tunnel in Daejeon, South Korea.
Bo Zeng, Zijia Zhao, Zhong Chen, Dongmei Pan, Zhongliang Lv, Yanyun Ma
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 88-97
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1850158
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fusion power, which generates electricity from the heat of fusion reactions, has the potential to solve the future energy crisis; hence, methods have been developed to study fusion reactions in a fusion reactor. For neutronic analyses of a fusion reactor, the reaction rate should be precisely calculated. The traditional calculation method has some defects. First, the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction cross-section data used are of the semiclassical model described by Gamow theory, which provides relatively accurate cross sections at energies below several hundreds of kilo-electron-volts in a center-of-mass frame. However, when energies increase, the data may be inaccurate. The ENDF/B-VI database provides accurate energies below 30 MeV. Since tokamak research always aims to raise the temperature inside, the ENDF/B-VI database may be more accurate at high temperatures and fit the research better. Second, adjacent plasmas with different temperatures and densities may influence each other and finally influence the reaction rate, which is not taken into account in the traditional calculation method. In this work, a numerical algorithm based on the ENDF/B-VI database employs both the Monte Carlo method and the discrete ordinates (SN) method, which is used to simulate the transportation process to obtain more accurate reaction rate results. Parameters of the European demonstration fusion power plant (DEMO) A-mode are used to calculate the reaction rate by both the traditional method and the new algorithm. The differences of the results are shown, and the total reaction rate of the new algorithm is 4.23% higher than that of the traditional method.