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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
NRC nominee Nieh commits to independent safety mission
During a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing today, Ho Nieh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as a commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was urged to maintain the agency’s independence regardless of political pressure from the Trump administration.
Tim Teichmann, Xueli Luo, Thomas Giegerich, Christian Day
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | May 2024 | Pages 399-410
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2229679
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The requirement for a reduction of the tritium inventory of the European demonstration fusion reactor (EU-DEMO) has led to the active research and development of a continuously working pumping process termed “KALPUREX.” This process foresees the direct recycling of a large fraction of the unburnt hydrogen isotopologues via superpermeation in metal foil pumps during the burn phase. The remaining exhaust gas mixture is pumped by continuously operating, mercury-driven linear diffusion pumps. Diffusion pumps are kinetic high vacuum pumps whose pumping principle is based on the momentum transfer from a supersonic mercury vapor jet to the pumped gas mixture. Like many high vacuum pumps, they feature species-dependent pumping speeds. In the present work, we develop a simplified hybrid model of the high vacuum pumping train in order to estimate the effective pumping speed of the integrated system. The results of this model and its implications on the further development of the vacuum system are discussed for the burn and dwell phases of EU-DEMO.