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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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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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.
Jochen Max Linke, Takeshi Hirai, Manfred Rödig, Lorenz Anton Singheiser
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 46 | Number 1 | July 2004 | Pages 142-151
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A550
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Beside quasi-stationary plasma operation, short transient thermal pulses with deposited energy densities on the order of several tens of MJ/m2 are a serious concern for next-step devices, in particular, for tokamak devices such as ITER. The most serious of these transient events are plasma disruptions. Here, a considerable fraction of the plasma energy is deposited on a localized surface area in the divertor strike zone region. The timescale of these events is typically on the order of 1 ms. In spite of the fact that a dense cloud of ablation vapor will form above the strike zone, only partial shielding of the divertor armor from incident plasma particles will occur. As a consequence, thermal shock-induced crack formation, vaporization, surface melting, melt layer ejection, and particle emission induced by brittle destruction processes will limit the lifetime of the components. In addition, dust particles (neutron-activated metals or tritium-enriched carbon) are a serious concern from a safety point of view.Other transient heat loads that occasionally occur in magnetic confinement experiments such as instabilities in the plasma positioning (vertical displacement events) also may cause irreversible damage to plasma-facing components (PFCs), particularly to metals such as beryllium and tungsten. Other serious damage to PFCs is due to intense fluxes of 14-MeV neutrons in D-T burning plasma devices. Integrated neutron fluence of several tens of displacements per atom in future thermonuclear fusion reactors will degrade essential physical properties of the components (e.g., thermal conductivity). Another serious concern is the embrittlement of the heat sink and the plasma-facing materials (PFMs).To investigate the performance of carbon-based and metallic PFMs under the aforementioned thermal loads, simulation experiments have been performed in highly specialized high-heat-flux test facilities. The neutron-induced degradation of materials and components was investigated on selected test samples that were irradiated in high-flux material test reactors.