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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Kirk L. Shanahan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 4 | May 2017 | Pages 555-564
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1291042
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium decays to 3He, and when this decay occurs inside a metal tritide, the 3He is largely retained in the material’s bulk. This impacts the subsequent behavior of the hydrogen isotope absorption and desorption, altering the materials thermodynamic characteristics. Chemical substitution can form alternative miscible hydridable metal alloys over some concentration ranges with modified thermodynamic properties. This allows the ‘tuning’ of metal hydride characteristics to expand the inventory of available materials for use, potentially allowing a closer match to desired performance characteristics. It is important to quantify tritium aging effects in order to predict the long term, in-process behavior of metal hydride materials. The Savannah River National Laboratory has been interested in elucidating the impact of tritium exposure on the behavior of hydrideable metals and metal alloys. Pd alloy foils of nominal 5 and 9 at% Cr, Ni, and Co, were loaded with tritium, and stored for ~1 year in static storage. One sample (Pd-4.8 at% Ni) was subsequently stored for an additional ~3 years. Isotherms were determined following storage periods to study the tritium induced changes caused by tritium decay. Typical effects such as plateau pressure depression and heel formation were noted. The materials proved to be unusually sensitive to the isotherm determination process and decay effects were partially reversed, or “healed”. The Pd-4.8wt%Ni sample was removed from its storage unit, whereupon it was found to have turned into powder, and further studied with additional techniques elsewhere.