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Latest News
What’s the most difficult question you’ve been asked as a maintenance instructor?
Blye Widmar
"Where are the prints?!"
This was the final question in an onslaught of verbal feedback, comments, and critiques I received from my students back in 2019. I had two years of instructor experience and was teaching a class that had been meticulously rehearsed in preparation for an accreditation visit. I knew the training material well and transferred that knowledge effectively enough for all the students to pass the class. As we wrapped up, I asked the students how they felt about my first big system-level class, and they did not hold back.
“Why was the exam from memory when we don’t work from memory in the plant?” “Why didn’t we refer to the vendor documents?” “Why didn’t we practice more on the mock-up?” And so on.
Michal Cihlář, Slavomír Entler, Tomáš Czakoj, Václav Dostál, Jan Prehradný, Pavel Zácha
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 104-116
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2120301
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Current tritium production might not be enough for all future fusion research reactors. Different approaches for tritium production have been studied in the past, one of which was tritium production using the accelerator-driven subcritical systems. This idea was dismissed in the 1990s as uneconomical when compared to using existing commercial light water reactors. This paper presents changes to the basic idea, mainly the use of a molten spallation target and molten lithium breeding volume. This advanced design is described, optimized for tritium yield using the MCNP 6.2.0 code, and compared between different accelerators.
The optimized configuration consists of a 1-GeV, 200-mA proton accelerator, a molten Pb-Bi eutectic spallation target with a length of 60 cm and a diameter of 75 cm, and molten lithium breeding volume with dimensions of 500 cm in length and 900 cm in diameter. As calculated, the annual production of the proposed accelerator-driven tritium production system could be as high as 350 g of tritium with the optimized configuration.
