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Conference Spotlight
2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Star Trek or Planet of the Apes?
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
These days, the ship of civil nuclear technology we are all aboard is sailing through a turbulent passage. The winds and currents are favorable, but there are swells ahead: steep energy-demand projections, buoyant equity valuations, splashy announcements, a generational realignment of nuclear policies and institutional norms.
Part of the reason we chose “Building the Nuclear Century” as the theme for this year’s Winter Conference was to put some ballast in the hull of the nuclear conversation.
Advanced nuclear fission and fusion energy development are accelerating, both here and around the world. And yet, at least in the U.S., we are still years away from connecting commercial Gen IV systems to our grid.
In a world growing increasingly impatient, how do we stay on task and deliver? There are three ingredients to success.
R. Gangradey, J. Mishra, S. Mukherjee, P. Nayak, P. Panchal, J. Agarwal, V. Gupta
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 5 | July 2021 | Pages 333-339
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1904770
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A cryopump works on the principle of cooling down a metal surface or a surface coated with a porous material, namely, cryopanels, to cryogenic temperature. The gases stick to cryopanels thus lowering pressure and thereby creating a vacuum in an enclosed space. Materials used in the development of cryopumps include metals like copper and steel as structural materials, composite material like G10 for supports, thermal insulation, adhesive to fix sorbent to the metal surface, Vespel as an insulator, and various kinds of coatings on metal surfaces. Thermal properties govern heat load management and thereby the temperature of the cryopanels and hence pumping phenomena. This paper focuses on the experimental investigation of properties like specific heat, thermal diffusivity, thermal conductivity of materials, and their variation with lowering of temperature to cryogenic levels. A study was carried out to quantify the thermal properties of adhesive to fix the sorbent, the metal sheet of the cryopanel coated with activated charcoal granules using the adhesive, materials like G10 and Vespel, and high-emissivity black coating. The thermal conductivity (studied up to −150°C) for different kinds of adhesives was found to be in the range of 0.48 to 0.9 W/m‧K; for Vespel SP21 and G10, it is 0.58 and 0.8 W/m‧K, respectively. The emissivity at room temperature of the sorbent-coated cryopanels was 0.94, and for the high-emissivity black coating, it was in the range of 0.93 to 0.94.