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 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2026
Nuclear Technology
July 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
The deadline arrives: Checking in on the Reactor Pilot Program
On May 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the DOE,” which instructed the Department of Energy to create a Reactor Pilot Program (RPP)—a new system in which companies could pursue DOE authorization to build and test their first-of-a-kind nuclear technologies. EO 14301 set an ambitious goal for that program: three reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026.
K.G. Porges, M.M. Bretscher
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1903-1908
Neutronic | Proceedings of the Ninth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Oak Brook, Illinois, October 7-11, 1990) | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29620
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Measurement of the local breeding rate in a large assembly of fusion blanket candidate materials, irradiated by a fusion neutron source, serves the dual purpose of blanket design support and, perhaps more importantly, of testing analytical methods and cross-section libraries. In this report, we present technical details of a tritium production rate measurement scheme based on the use of neutron irradiation of encapsulated lithium metal samples and subsequent thermal digestion of the samples in a metered carrier hydrogen stream, conversion to THO and LS-counting. A comparison of the scheme to other means of tritium production rate (TPR) measurement with respect to accuracy and other characteristics indicates that its potential accuracy exceeds that of wet-chemistry tritium extraction from lithium salt pellets or TLD deployment and is comparable to the best accuracy of lithium-glass traversing schemes. The sample fabrication and tritium extraction techniques that will be described evolved from well-tested equipment that was previously used in critical (fission) reactor work and cross section measurements, but needed some modification to increase the throughput and thus allow processing the large number of samples required in blanket assay. The applicability of this scheme to measurements at arbitrarily high neutron flux and higher temperatures will be briefly commented on.