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In transition: Commercializing fusion power
Commercial fusion power is closer than ever. There are now around 30 U.S. fusion companies, several of which claim to be on track to connect to the grid as early as the 2030s.
Tokamak and laser inertial confinement approaches benefit from decades of research at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and ITER, with alternative concepts including stellarator, magnetic mirror, and Z-pinch confinement also making notable progress as private and government funding for fusion increases.
M. V. Speight
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 37 | Number 2 | August 1969 | Pages 180-185
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A20676
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The influence of intragranular bubbles, acting as efficient trapping sites, on the migration of fission gas atoms in material under irradiation is assessed. It is considered that the bubbles are unstable due to the operation of an irradiation-induced resolution process tending to dissolve their enclosed gas. Treating an individual grain within the material as a sphere whose boundary behaves as a perfect sink, general expressions are derived for the intragranular concentrations of gas existing instantaneously within bubbles and in solution. It is shown that the relationships may be simplified for the range of irradiation times and conditions likely to be encountered in practice. Under these conditions, an expression is obtained for the quantity of gas released to the grain boundary, and this is compared with the analogous expression derived previously by Booth for the case where there are no intragranular traps. The fact that the resolution process through its effects on bubbles at the grain boundary will return some gas to the matrix and in so doing destroy the property of perfect-sink behavior is later considered. By an approximate method the appropriate modification to the formula describing the quantity of gas released to the boundary is deduced. This final expression, including the complete effects of intragranular trapping and irradiation-induced resolution on gas migration, may provide the basis on which to calculate the amount of gas which is eventually released external to the material from regions where intergranular bubbles grow so large that they interlink.