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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
W. R. Meier
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 3 | April 2005 | Pages 616-620
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Inertial Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A754
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since the completion of the Robust Point Design (RPD) for a heavy ion fusion power plant, progress has been made in addressing key issues and some possible new directions have emerged. Work has continued on thick liquid wall chambers, which are particularly well suited to heavy ion fusion since they allow compact chambers minimizing the standoff for the final focus magnets and thus improving beam focusing on target. Work has continued on HIF indirect-drive targets in an attempt to allow larger spot sizes than the ~2 mm spots required by the baseline target in the RPD. A promising approach is the use of shine shields at both ends of the hohlraum, which allows beams to fill the entire 5-mm-radius target. This larger spot size target design opens the door to other driver and focusing schemes. Work has started exploring a modular driver approach in which many individual accelerators provide the total beam energy on target as opposed to the single accelerator with many (~100) individual beamlets threading common induction cores. Neutralized drift compression and plasma channel focusing are being studied as a way to deliver these high current beams to target. We have also started investigating new chamber designs that would be compatible with this focusing scheme, in particular designs using a vortex flow configuration to establish the thick liquid wall. This paper highlights progress since the last Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) Conference.