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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.
Meeting Spotlight
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
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!
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Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
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.
Yilong Li, Tong Zhou, Shili Jiang, Xinxing Qian
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 6 | August 2023 | Pages 630-640
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2169026
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The monoblock divertor target plate (MDTP) is a mainstream divertor target plate. MDTP was installed in EAST and in WEST and will be used in ITER. Local high-temperature hot spots (HS) were observed on MDTP during a plasma experiment. HS will reduce the lifetime of MDTP. In this paper, the causes of HS on MDTP are determined through theoretical analysis and are verified by numerical simulations. The HS on MDTP seem to be caused by small high-density heat load areas on the toroidal and poloidal direction surfaces facing the incident direction of the plasma strike line (PSL) of the MDTP tungsten block. When toroidal HS and poloidal HS appear simultaneously, a super local high-temperature HS will be formed at the corner (facing the incident direction of PSL) of the MDTP tungsten block. The HS on MDTP can be eliminated by optimizing the geometry of the MDTP tungsten block, when the plasma configuration is determined. A method and the scope of application of the method, which can be used for tungsten block geometry optimization, are given in this paper. In order to facilitate the selection of a divertor configuration, the heat flux–carrying performance of the optimized MDTP was evaluated. In order to attain a maximum temperature within MDTP of less than 900 K, it was found that if the poloidal incidence angle between PSL and MDTP can be stably controlled as 5 deg (or 35 deg), MDTP can directly withstand PSL with a peak heat flux density of no more than 90 (or 40 ).