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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.
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Utility Working Conference and Vendor Technology Expo (UWC 2024)
August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Props and jets
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
A good bit of this month’s edition of Nuclear News is devoted to the latest developments in fusion energy.
While 2024 may not have the punchy investment headlines of ’22, I think it’s fair to say that fusion energy technology is making tangible progress beneath the surface, with unannounced stealth funding plans and the continuation of public-private partnerships.
When will it become a productive element of our global energy architecture? No one knows for sure. There are still myriad challenges to be solved in high-temperature materials, high–critical temperature superconductors, advanced algorithms, and tritium fuel cycle control, just to name a few. But every day, fusion feels a tiny bit more mature, like somehow it has left its childhood bedroom in physics to move into the dorm room of engineering.
M. L. Spaeth, K. R. Manes, J. Honig
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 1 | January-February 2016 | Pages 250-264
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-861
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
During the years before the National Ignition Facility (NIF) laser system, a set of generally accepted cleaning procedures had been developed for the large 1ω amplifiers of an inertial confinement fusion laser, and up until 1999 similar procedures were planned for NIF. Several parallel sets of test results were obtained from 1992 to 1999 for large amplifiers using these accepted cleaning procedures in the Beamlet physics test bed and in the Amplifier Module Prototype Laboratory (AMPLAB), a four-slab-high prototype large amplifier structure. Both of these showed damage to their slab surfaces that, if projected to operating conditions for NIF, would lead to higher than acceptable slab-refurbishment rates. This paper tracks the search for the smoking gun origin of this damage and describes the solution employed in NIF for avoiding flashlamp-induced aerosol damage to its 1ω amplifier slabs.