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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.
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NC State celebrates 70 years of nuclear engineering education
An early picture of the research reactor building on the North Carolina State University campus. The Department of Nuclear Engineering is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its nuclear engineering curriculum in 2020–2021. Photo: North Carolina State University
The Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University has spent the 2020–2021 academic year celebrating the 70th anniversary of its becoming the first U.S. university to establish a nuclear engineering curriculum. It started in 1950, when Clifford Beck, then of Oak Ridge, Tenn., obtained support from NC State’s dean of engineering, Harold Lampe, to build the nation’s first university nuclear reactor and, in conjunction, establish an educational curriculum dedicated to nuclear engineering.
The department, host to the 2021 ANS Virtual Student Conference, scheduled for April 8–10, now features 23 tenure/tenure-track faculty and three research faculty members. “What a journey for the first nuclear engineering curriculum in the nation,” said Kostadin Ivanov, professor and department head.
James P. Blanchard, Carl J. Martin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 585-590
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A749
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The first wall of a laser fusion chamber will experience high heat loads pulsed at 5-10 Hz with pulse widths on the order of a few microseconds. This poses a challenging problem for dry wall designs, as the wall will be susceptible to a variety of failure modes. The primary design concept of the High Average Power Laser (HAPL) project is a ferritic steel first wall coated with tungsten armor. Due to the extreme heat loads, the armor will experience high temperatures, extensive yielding, and surface cracking. In order to evaluate the ability of this design to provide a suitable lifetime, a series of experiments to simulate chamber conditions using ions, x-rays, infrared heating, and lasers is under way. These experimental efforts have been coupled with numerical modeling to help determine likely failure modes and establish design criteria for chambers. This paper compares models for the thermomechanical effects seen in the tests to those expected in a full power chamber, in order to assess the ability of the tests to mimic the actual chamber performance. The tests are found to have some limitations, but they still offer excellent approximations of the true behavior.