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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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August 4–7, 2024
Marco Island, FL|JW Marriott Marco Island
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Latest News
Vogtle-3 shuts down for valve issue
One of the new Vogtle units in Georgia was shut down unexpectedly on Monday last week for a valve issue that has since been investigated and repaired. According to multiple local news outlets, Georgia Power reported on July 17 that Unit 3 was back in service.
Southern Company spokesperson Jacob Hawkins confirmed that Vogtle-3 went off line at 9:25 p.m. local time on July 8 “due to lowering water levels in the steam generators caused by a valve issue on one of the three main feedwater pumps.”
Mofreh R. Zaghloul
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 1 | January 2006 | Pages 28-38
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1083
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The molten salt Flinabe (LiF-NaF-BeF2) is proposed as a liquid wall material for future fusion reactors because of its many attractive aspects. High-temperature Flinabe gases (plasmas) appear in the inertial fusion energy chamber over a wide range of temperatures and pressures because of the absorption of X-rays and debris, emitted from the target microexplosion, within a very thin surface layer of the Flinabe liquid wall. The deposited energy heats the surface edge of the Flinabe wall to very high temperatures where vaporization, dissociation, and ionization take place and high-temperature plasma is generated. Equation-of-state (EOS) and ionization equilibrium data of the resulting high-temperature gas are needed to perform gas dynamics calculations and the required assessments of many research and development issues in nuclear fusion. Nevertheless, data for Flinabe EOS or ionization states are missing in the literature, and there is an immediate need to model and estimate these properties. In this paper, a self-consistent model for the ionization equilibrium and EOS of weakly nonideal high-temperature Flinabe gas is presented and used to compute the ionization equilibrium data and EOS of such an important material. Nonideality effects have been taken into account in terms of depression of the ionization potentials, coulombic correction to plasma kinetic pressure, and truncated partition functions. A reduced formulation and efficient algorithm to solve the set of nonlinear Saha equations subjected to the constraints of electroneutrality and conservation of nuclei have been used to generate ionization equilibrium and Flinabe EOS over a wide range of temperatures and pressures. A criterion for the validity of the assumption of local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) is applied to the results showing the regions of pressure-temperature phase-space over which the LTE assumption can be justified and accepted. Estimates of high-temperature Flinabe EOS and ionization states are presented and discussed.