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Nuclear Installations Safety
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
V. I. Vysotskii, V. D. Rusov, T. N. Zelentsova, M. V. Vysotskyy, V. P. Smolyar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 716-729
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2147389
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper discusses the physical and mathematical foundations and possible applications of the intensity correlation method for spatial three-dimensional (3-D) positional detection (finding the 3-D spatial position) of distant γ-ray or neutrino sources in real time or after a set of registered events. This method is based on the correlation of intensities of event sequences measured by several spaced-apart distant detectors. A specific consideration is made of the possibility of using a correlation intensities method for the analysis of the processes within a nuclear reactor, for the search of the hypothetical intra-terrestrial georeactor (planetocentric nuclear fission reactors), for the optimization of the method of single-photon-emission-computed tomography in medicine, and for other applications. The conditions of successful applications of the intensity correlation method for these systems are determined. The main problem with this method is connected to a relatively low count rate of registered neutrino events.
