ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Sümer Şahi̇n, Ralph W. Moir, Joseph D. Lee, Sabahattin Ünalan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 25 | Number 4 | July 1994 | Pages 388-397
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A30245
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The tritium breeding and energy absorption in an inertial fusion energy (IFE) reactor chamber have been investigated with variable coolant zone thickness using different materials. Examples are given for HYLIFE-II (an IFE reactor design) and for magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) energy conversion chambers using Flibe (Li2BeF4) as coolant. Investigations related to MHD are extended to the use of LiH, lithium, and Lil7-Pb83 eutectic as working fluid. Natural lithium is used in all cases, except in the case of LiPb, for which both natural and enriched options were calculated. To achieve a useful energy density for energy conversion purposes with a sufficient tritium breeding ratio (TBR = 1.1 to 1.2), coolant zone thicknesses must be 25 cm for LiH, 50 to 60 cm for Flibe, and 80 cm for lithium. The use of Lil7-Pb83 with natural lithium and with lithium enriched to 90% 6Li requires coolant zone thicknesses of 120 and 60 cm, respectively, to obtain a tritium breeding of TBR = 1.1, which gives an extremely low energy deposition density. This low density and the large coolant mass make LiPb unattractive for MHD and HYLIFE-II applications.
