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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Securing the advanced reactor fleet
Physical protection accounts for a significant portion of a nuclear power plant’s operational costs. As the U.S. moves toward smaller and safer advanced reactors, similar protection strategies could prove cost prohibitive. For tomorrow’s small modular reactors and microreactors, security costs must remain appropriate to the size of the reactor for economical operation.
Akito Ipponsugi, Kazunari Katayama, Taku Matsumoto, Shogo Iwata, Makoto Oya, Youji Someya
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | 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.