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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
M. Wykes
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 48 | Number 1 | July-August 2005 | Pages 39-42
Technical Paper | Tritium Science and Technology - Tritium Processing, Transportation, and Storage | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A875
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The tritium inventory of all the ITER torus cryopumps open to the vacuum vessel has an administrative limit of 120 g, including tritium bound to hydrocarbon compounds formed by combination of fuel gas with carbon plasma-facing components. The total hydrogenic inventory of each of the torus cryopumps has to be less than that resulting in a deflagration pressure of 0.2 MPa (the design pressure of the ITER vacuum vessel of which the torus and neutral beam cryopump pressure boundaries are a part) following a hydrogen-air ignition. Since the neutral beamline fuelling is with protium and deuterium only, these pumps do not significantly contribute to the 120 g tritium limit. The hydrogenic inventories of both the torus and neutral beam cryopumps add to the total for the vacuum vessel following an in-vessel ingress of coolant from a failed water-cooled component, wherein hydrogen is produced from steam reacting with hot metallic dust. There is therefore a large incentive to keep the peak inventories of both the torus and neutral beamline cryopumps as low as practicable. The paper describes the regeneration patterns of the torus and neutral beamline cryopumps that are used to attain this goal while achieving the required vacuum conditions commensurate with the reference ITER pulse scenarios.
