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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
Japan gets new U for enrichment as global power and fuel plans grow
President Trump is in Japan today, with a visit with new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the agenda. Takaichi, who took office just last week as Japan’s first female prime minister, has already spoken in favor of nuclear energy and of accelerating the restart of Japan’s long-shuttered power reactors, as Reuters and others have reported. Much of the uranium to power those reactors will be enriched at Japan’s lone enrichment facility—part of Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd.’s Rokkasho fuel complex—which accepted its first delivery of fresh uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) in 11 years earlier this month.
Zhiyong An, Alice Ying, Mohamed Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 4 | May 2005 | Pages 1101-1105
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - First Wall, Blanket, and Shield | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A834
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experiments on thermomechanics interactions between clad and pebble beds have been performed with overstoichiometric lithium orthosilicate pebbles (pebble diameters between 0.25 and 0.63 mm) at temperatures of 700-800°C. The experimental results show that the thermal deformation of our pebble bed system is nonlinear and when the operating temperature is higher than 600°C, thermal creep deformation is generated. In this paper, constitutive equations of the elastic and creep deformation are derived from the experimental results. Incorporating the effective constitutive equations in finite element method (FEM), numerical investigations presenting the elastic and plastic deformation characteristics of pebble bed system are comparable to the experimental behaviors. In addition, discrete element method (DEM) is underdevelopment to derive constitutive equations for different pebble beds. The preliminary results of DEM show the stress distribution inside the pebble beds at steady or transient states, which helps us to identify the destructive region in a pebble bed system.