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Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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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
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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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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.
G. H. Miley, H. Hora, B. Malekynia, M. Ghoranneviss
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 384-390
IFE Target Design | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8931
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Block ignition was proposed recently as a possible alternate approach to fast ignition for ICF fusion. This approach uses a modified petawatt-picosecond (PW-ps) laser pulse shape where the prepulse is strongly suppressed. This results in highly directed plasma blocks due to nonlinear (ponderomotive) force acceleration with space charge neutral ion current densities above 1011 Amp/cm2. This allows ignition of deuterium-tritium targets at densities somewhat above solid state density. However, a key issue has been the need to reduce the extremely high thresholds for the high energy flux densities of the blocks as pointed out in a related theory by Bobin and Chu in 1972. Here we show how the threshold can be reduced by a factor up to 20 by two effects. An important contribution comes from the inhibition factor for thermal conductivity due to electric double layers created in the block process. The second effect is the reduction to the stopping length, giving increased heating by the fusion product alpha due to collective interactions in the blocks. Results from including these effects in a hydrodynamic analysis are presented. The advantage of this approach for an ICF fusion reactor is the relaxed pre-compression requirement for high gain.