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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.
V. Badalassi, A. Sircar, J. M. Solberg, J. W. Bae, K. Borowiec, P. Huang, S. Smolentsev, E. Peterson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 3 | April 2023 | Pages 345-379
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2151818
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Fusion Energy Reactor Models Integrator (FERMI) is an integrated simulation environment under development for the coupled simulation of the plasma, first wall, and blanket of fusion reactor designs. The FERMI goals are to shorten the overall design cycle while guaranteeing unprecedented accuracy, thus integrating fusion design activities, facilitating an optimal reactor design, and reducing development risks. These goals are achieved by coupling single-physics solvers into a multiphysics simulation environment (FERMI). The Integrated Plasma Simulator (IPS)–FASt TRANsport (IPS-FASTRAN) simulation framework is used for the following: plasma physics, MCNP/Shift codes for neutron and photon transport, OpenFoam for computational fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), HyPerComp Incompressible MHD solver for Arbitrary Geometry (HIMAG) for dual-coolant lead-lithium (DCLL) blankets, and DIABLO for structural mechanics simulations. These codes are coupled using the open-source library named precise Code Interaction Coupling Environment (preCICE). FERMI’s features are tested with the analysis of the liquid immersion blanket (LIB) [proposed in the Affordable Robust Compact (ARC)–class tokamak design], the DCLL blanket [proposed in the Fusion Pilot Plant (FPP) design], and other benchmark cases. The calculated figures of merit are the tritium breeding ratio, material activation, displacements per atom, shutdown dose rate, heat deposited in the vacuum vessel and blanket, temperature hot spots, and displacements caused by swelling and creep. A critical technical problem is multiphysics code coupling, which is tackled here, and the first three-dimensional (3D) simulations of the DCLL-FPP and LIB-ARC blankets are presented. To the authors’ knowledge, FERMI represents the first effort to perform 3D simulations of nuclear fusion first wall and blankets in a fully coupled multiphysics manner.