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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NNSA awards BWXT $1.5B defense fuels contract
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.
Huajiang Jin, Shuaishuai Zhang, Jianxiang Zheng, Jian Zhang, Huifang Miao, Liuxuan Cao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 5 | July 2024 | Pages 682-694
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2232229
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Understanding irradiation-induced degradation processes of nuclear structural materials is essential for creating methodologies and procedures for nuclear reactor safety. Due to the time- and resource-intensive property of both experiments and multiscale simulations of irradiation damage, the trial-and-error approach is completely inefficient. Recently, machine learning techniques have been employed to predict the properties of reduced activation ferritic martensitic (RAFM) steels, such as yield strength and elongation, as well as irradiation embrittlement in steel pressure vessels, with encouraging progress.
In this work, void swelling is predicted using a machine learning method for the first time, taking into account the synergistic effects of displacement damage, helium, and hydrogen. Assisted by the analysis of feature engineering, seven machine learning models are trained and compared by multicriteria evaluation methods. Finally, the parameter-optimized gradient-boosting model is selected as the mapping function with the highest accuracy and universality to predict void swelling. In particular, the dependence of the void swelling and the injection amount of helium and hydrogen in the continuous parameter variation range is predicted beyond the existing experimental data. This work demonstrates the feasibility of machine learning to predict material irradiation damage by synergistic effects and has practical significance in nuclear material optimization and reactor safety.