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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Zap Energy hits 37-million-degree electron temperatures in compact fusion device
Zap Energy announced April 23 that it has reached 1-3 keV plasma electron temperatures—roughly the equivalent of 11 to 37 million degrees Celsius—using its sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch approach to fusion. Reaching temperatures above that of the sun’s core (which is 10 million degrees Celsius temperature) is just one hurdle required before any fusion confinement concept can realistically pursue net gain and fusion energy.
Matthew P. Simones, Sudarshan K. Loyalka
Nuclear Technology | Volume 189 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 45-62
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-14
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs), an improved understanding of the production of carbonaceous dust (e.g., by abrasion, corrosion, radiation damage, and gas-to-particle conversion) and the subsequent transport of the dust and associated sorbed fission products is needed. Diffusion charging and/or self-charging of the suspended dust particles (aerosol) is likely to occur, which affects how the aerosol evolves in time and ultimately deposits on surfaces. At present, nuclear reactor safety codes, such as MELCOR, do not account for these effects and there is currently no consensus on their importance, partly due to a lack of experimental data as well as tools for computations. Further experimentation and modeling of these effects are therefore needed to resolve these issues. We report on an experimental investigation of the coagulation of charged aerosols pertinent to HTGRs by measuring the evolution of size and charge distributions over time and comparing the experimental results with computations using the direct simulation Monte Carlo method. Measurements have been completed for both silver and carbon ultrafine aerosols using a tandem differential mobility analyzer and an open-flow coagulation chamber with a residence time of nearly 400 s. Results for both aerosols indicate that coagulation occurs faster than predicted by the simulations, at times differing by an order of magnitude. While the paper is focused on specific aerosols, it is of wider significance in that it provides the first such comparisons between data and simulations on charged aerosol coagulation.