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.
Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
Latest Magazine Issues
Feb 2025
Jul 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
March 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
February 2025
Latest News
Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
A. A. Haasz, J. W. Davis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 1 | July 2006 | Pages 58-67
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1220
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Both physical sputtering and chemical erosion take place in tokamaks. Physical sputtering occurs for all elements for incident particle energies greater than an energy threshold. For carbon targets the threshold difference for the three hydrogen isotopes is relatively small. In the energy range of 100 to 3000 eV, the physical sputtering yields are similar for D and T, and the H yields are lower by about a factor of 2 to 3. Chemical erosion studies of graphite due to H+ and D+ impact also show evidence of some isotopic effect - with the deuterium yield being larger. The isotopic yield ratios (D-yield/H-yield) observed in almost all of the chemical erosion measurements, including ion beams, laboratory plasma devices, and tokamaks, lie between 1 and 2. The recently measured chemical erosion yields due to tritium ions also fall in this range. (The notable exceptions are the mass-loss studies at the Max-Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik in Garching, Germany, where for energies <100 eV, the isotopic yield ratio was seen to increase from 4 to 7 with decreasing energy.) A nominal value of 1.5 ± 0.5 is suggested as the most appropriate value for the D/H yield ratio. This is fully consistent with the square root of mass dependence proposed for the modeling of chemical erosion.