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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.
Sai Chaitanya Tadepalli, Priti Kanth, P. V. Subhash
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 188 | Number 3 | December 2017 | Pages 282-293
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1367570
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The next generation nuclear facilities like Gen-IV fission reactors and fusion plasma will have a huge amount of activated waste production and resulting harmful consequences in terms of radioactive responses such as activity, decay heat, and dose. It is imperative to understand and quantify the impact of individual parent elements or isotopes in the material on major radiological responses. Such quantification serves as an impact indicator. This paper attempts to develop a method to aid this quantification that would eventually offer a complete material activation analysis. Here, we begin by presenting the mathematical formulation to account for the contribution of the parent constituents of any irradiated material toward the radiological responses directly, defined as the contributing factor (CF). The method is easily adaptable to other activation solvers and provides the user with CFs of parents that highlight the individual importance of the constituents. These factors can be used to determine the impact of elements on radiological quantities and how much tailoring of these elements will affect the radiological response of the material. All these can be done in a single run of the code, developed as an aid to activation solvers. Moreover, improved response of the modified material composition after reducing harmful parents can be directly calculated using the derived CFs without rerunning the solver. Thus, an optimized composition of the material either isotopically or elementwise can be easily obtained. A few examples highlighting the application of this technique and its importance are provided at the end.