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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
Akito Ipponsugi, Kazunari Katayama, Taku Matsumoto, Shogo Iwata, Makoto Oya, Youji Someya
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | April-May 2024 | Pages 253-259
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2271228
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several fusion plants plan to utilize two high-temperature and high-pressurized water coolant systems. Because of the high hydrogen-isotope mobility in high-temperature metal, tritium will inevitably transfer from the plasma side to the secondary coolant through the primary coolant. From the viewpoints of fuel control, tritium safety, and social acceptance, it is compulsory to investigate the tritium concentration dependence of permeation phenomena experimentally. Therefore, this study conducted a protium permeation experiment instead of tritium, which mocked the situation where the tritium concentration in the primary loop was extremely high. Considering the results in the previous tritium permeation research by the present authors, the tritium permeation behavior was likely proportional to the first power of the tritium concentration. Then, based on these experiments and references regarding the tritium permeation rate and water detritiation system (WDS) design, tritium concentration was computed in both loops. In this calculation condition, the primary and secondary loops reached about 0.4 TBq/kg and 167 MBq/kg during 3-year operations, respectively. Also, it was found that the required feed rate to keep the tritium concentration at 1 TBq/kg was 46.5 kg/h, which is less than the existing WDS specification.