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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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Latest News
Sam Altman steps down as Oklo board chair
Advanced nuclear company Oklo Inc. has new leadership for its board of directors as billionaire Sam Altman is stepping down from the position he has held since 2015. The move is meant to open new partnership opportunities with OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, and other artificial intelligence companies.
Ke Deng, Mingjun Zhang, Xijun Wu, Qin Zhang, Guo Yang, Zhaowei Ma, Fei Wei, Guanghua Wang, Wei Liu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 9 | September 2019 | Pages 1143-1153
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1590076
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Because of its high content in irradiated nuclear graphite, tritium is treated as one of the most important radionuclides, and it should be carefully decontaminated before the final disposal of nuclear graphite. Tritium has similar chemical and physical characteristics to those of hydrogen; therefore, in this research, the adsorption and desorption of tritium in nuclear graphite using hydrogen were studied. Three kinds of nuclear graphite, IG-110, NBG-18, and NG-CT-10, were used to conduct adsorption and desorption experiments using a new method based on gas chromatography; subsequently, a first-principles calculation on graphene was carried out to simulate the desorption of hydrogen from graphite. The results showed that tritium can be weakly and strongly adsorbed in nuclear graphite. The differences found in the amount of weak adsorption within nuclear graphite were mainly due to the graphite’s porosity and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller surface area, as reported previously in similar research. The mechanism for the strong adsorption was not explained clearly; it could be attributed to the results of a combination of the various physical properties of the graphite, especially the average pore size. The amount of weakly adsorbed hydrogen ranged from 48.4% to 95.2% of the total amount of adsorption for the nuclear graphite working at a temperature of 350°C. The weakly adsorbed tritium easily escaped from the nuclear graphite, indicating that this fraction of tritium would be the main source of pollution during the dismantling or the transportation of decommissioned graphite materials. In addition, the strongly adsorbed hydrogen began to be desorbed when the nuclear graphite was heated over 600°C, and 14% to 71% of the stably adsorbed hydrogen was desorbed when the temperature reached 700°C. A first-principles calculation indicated the activation energy for desorption of tritium from graphene to be about 2.17 eV.