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Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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The top 10 states of nuclear
The past few years have seen a concerted effort from many U.S. states to encourage nuclear development. The momentum behind nuclear-friendly policies has grown considerably, with many states repealing moratoriums, courting nuclear developers and suppliers, and in some cases creating advisory groups and road maps to push deployment of new nuclear reactors.
Mark R. Gilbert
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S744-S753
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2342506
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Modern nuclear physics software is well validated, providing advanced capabilities to support the engineering of the future generations of fission and fusion reactors. Transport simulators can model the transport of neutrons through reactor geometries, and inventory codes can accurately predict transmutation and activation. Meanwhile, material modeling applies a variety of techniques to understand how structural damage and composition changes will alter the properties of materials, ultimately limiting their usable lifetime in a reactor. Bridging the gap between nuclear simulation tools and materials modeling is a necessary step if these lifetimes are to be accurately predicted, which, for fusion, is critical to provide the necessary assurance of commercial viability. SPECTRA-PKA is a tool developed to compute the rates of structural damage source events, i.e. the primary knock-on atoms (PKAs), using the same nuclear data as used by transport and inventory simulations. Now, it has been interfaced with the binary collision approximation code SDTrimSP, allowing those PKA events, distributed spatially and temporally in an atomic system, to be converted into damage cascades. This computational infrastructure provides insight into the variation in damage distributions between different materials under the same nuclear environment. Example simulations for materials under fusion reactor conditions demonstrate how the rich detail of the nuclear environment can be applied directly to modeling, without the need for integral-average measures that omit those details.