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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.
Andrew J. Hummel, Todd S. Palmer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 183 | Number 1 | May 2016 | Pages 149-159
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-37
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The most widely used and versatile medical radioisotope today is 99mTc. Roughly 30 million people depend on this radioisotope for diagnostic imaging procedures each year, and this demand is expected to grow. Although there are numerous ways of producing this isotope, the most common is from fission product 99Mo, which is produced in all nuclear reactors fueled with 235U as a fission fragment with a yield of around 6.1%. Molybdenum-99 has a half-life of just over 2.5 days, and it will decay to 99mTc 87% of the time. The Reduced Enrichment for Research Test Reactors program was established at Argonne National Laboratory in 1978 to investigate technology that would aid in converting highly enriched uranium (HEU) facilities to low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel. Since the majority of all 99Mo produced currently comes from the irradiation of HEU fuel targets, there has been a growing effort to design LEU targets that can yield comparable quantities of high specific activity 99Mo. Recently, a novel LEU target design has been developed for use in TRIGA reactors for the production of 99Mo. The simulation tool MCNP5 was used to examine the neutronic behavior of multiple core configurations fueled solely with this new target.