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Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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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
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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
R. Maingi, M. A. Mahdavi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 1117-1126
Technical Paper | DIII-D Tokamak - Plasma Heat and Particle Exhaust | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A1064
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Density limit studies over the past 10 yr on DIII-D have successfully identified several processes that limit plasma density in various operating modes. The recent focus of these studies has been on maintenance of the high-density operational window with good H-mode level energy confinement. We find that detachment and onset of multifaceted axisymmetric radiation from the edge (MARFE), fueling efficiency, particle confinement, and magnetohydrodynamic activity can impose density limits in certain regimes. By studying these processes, we have devised techniques with either pellets or gas fueling and divertor pumping to achieve line average density above Greenwald scaling, relying on increasing the ratio of pedestal to separatrix density, as well as density profile peaking. The scaling of several of these processes to next-step devices (e.g., the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) has indicated that sufficiently high pedestal density can be achieved with conventional fueling techniques while ensuring divertor partial detachment needed for heat flux reduction. One density limit process requiring further study is neoclassical tearing mode (NTM) onset, and techniques for avoidance/mitigation of NTMs need additional development in present-day devices operated at high density.