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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Richard B. Vilim, Richard W. Brock
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 123 | Number 2 | June 1996 | Pages 259-271
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE96-A24187
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The trend toward increased reliance on passive features for power reactor safety makes it important to obtain the characteristics of the reactor system from measurements on the system. A method is described for solving for the delayed neutron parameters in a liquid-metal power reactor by fitting an analytic solution of the point-kinetics equations to the flux die-away from a dropped rod in an initially critical core. The method includes treatment of those conditions found in a power reactor that depart from those in a critical assembly experiment. These include a comparatively long rod drop time and a detector signal that instead of providing an integrated count rate is a sampled data signal proportional to the instantaneous fission power. The delayed neutron parameter values calculated from a rod drop experiment in the Experimental Breeder Reactor II are in agreement with values calculated using first principles and knowledge of core material composition and nuclear cross sections.