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ANS hosts webinar on criticality safety standards
A diagram depicting the NRC’s regulatory structure for nuclear criticality safety. (Image: Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series last month. RP3C chair Steven Krahn opened the meeting with brief introductory remarks about the importance of risk-informed, performance based (RIPB) decision-making and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods.
Letizia Melaragni, M. Scarpari, S. Carusotti, M. Notazio, R. Lombroni, G. Ramogida, S. Migliori, A. Frattolillo, M. Angelucci, G. Calabrò
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 81 | Number 6 | August 2025 | Pages 515-529
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2476842
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Vertical displacement events (VDEs) are among the most dangerous types of disruptions that can take place in a tokamak. They cause a fast release of both thermal and electromagnetic (EM) energy on the plasma-facing components, also inducing eddy and halo currents in the passive components touched by the relatively cold plasma. In the high EM field, these may result in enormous, localized loads. To reduce the impact of disruptions on the structures adjacent the plasma, a disruption mitigation system (DMS) is needed. In this frame, the Divertor Tokamak Test (DTT), which is being built in Frascati (Italy) and is designed to test different divertor solutions for DEMO and ITER, has been proposed to be equipped with a shattered pellet injection (SPI) system as the main DMS. Here, the initial design of DTT SPI and preliminary predictive disruptive plasma scenarios, simulated by the MAXFEA code, will be discussed. A detailed disruption database will be presented, built with a methodological approach. For a single-null configuration, the reference DTT parameters include a plasma current Ipla of 5.5 MA and a magnetic field Bt of 5.85 T, with major radius R and minor radius a of 2.19 and 0.7 m, respectively. In this case, i.e. an unmitigated disruption scenario, the forces acting on the vacuum vessel may reach up to −10.6 MN. Although the structural integrity of DTT is guaranteed under these EM loads, reducing them is recommended in the case of extensive campaigns of disruption studies. Therefore, mitigated ones will be discussed in this work. The current and integral EM forces induced during unmitigated and mitigated disruptions will be compared to give a preliminary evaluation of the effects of VDEs on the tokamak components in view of the DTT SPI system design.