Search results for "Nuclear engineering"
showing 10 items of 533 documents
Heavy ion and proton test site at JYFL-accelerator laboratory
1999
Abstract A radiation effects facility (RADEF) has been installed in the Accelerator Laboratory of the Department of Physics, University of Jyvaskyla (JYFL). The facility includes a special beam line dedicated to irradiation studies of semiconductor components and devices. It consists of a vacuum chamber including component movement apparatus and the necessary diagnostic equipment required for beam quality and intensity analysis. Construction of the station began in the summer of 1996, and in August 1997 the suitability of the station for space applications was evaluated. In this paper we introduce the accelerator laboratory along with the test station and its properties. We also describe th…
Ultra-high resolution mass separator—Application to detection of nuclear weapons tests
2009
Abstract A Penning trap-based purification process having a resolution of about 1 ppm is reported. In this context, we present for the first time a production method for the most complicated and crucially important nuclear weapons test signature, 133mXe. These pure xenon samples are required by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization to standardize and calibrate the worldwide network of xenon detectors.
Transient analysis of "2 inch Direct Vessel Injection line break" in SPES-2 facility by using TRACE code
2015
In the past few decades a lot of theoretical and experimental researches have been done to understand the physical phenomena characterizing nuclear accidents. In particular, after the Three Miles Island accident, several reactors have been designed to handle successfully LOCA events. This paper presents a comparison between experimental and numerical results obtained for the “2 inch Direct Vessel Injection line break” in SPES-2. This facility is an integral test facility built in Piacenza at the SIET laboratories and simulating the primary circuit, the relevant parts of the secondary circuits and the passive safety systems typical of the AP600 nuclear power plant. The numerical analysis her…
Nuclear Forensics: A methodology applicable to Nuclear Security and to Non-Proliferation
2011
Nuclear Security aims at the prevention and detection of and response to, theft, sabotage, unauthorized access, illegal transfer or other malicious acts involving nuclear material". Nuclear Forensics is a key element of nuclear security. Nuclear Forensics is defined as a methodology that aims at re-establishing the history of nuclear material of unknown origin. It is based on indicators that arise from known relationships between material characteristics and process history. Thus, nuclear forensics analysis includes the characterization of the material and correlation with production history. To this end, we can make use of parameters such as the isotopic composition of the nuclear material…
Gas-filled separators – An overview
2003
Gas-filled recoil separators have been used in nuclear physics studies since the early fifties. Most notably, they have found use in the separation of evaporation residues of heavy and very heavy elements from unwanted background. Gas-filled separators, alone or coupled to a detector array, offer an efficient, fast, compact and relatively inexpensive solution for nuclear structure studies. A new application is the use of a gas-filled device as a pre-separator in the study of chemical properties of the heaviest elements. Other uses include systematic study of fusion evaporation cross sections and accelerator mass spectrometry. In this contribution, an overview on gas-filled recoil separators…
New measurement of the 242Pu(n,γ) cross section at n-TOF-EAR1 for MOX fuels: Preliminary results in the RRR
2016
The spent fuel of current nuclear reactors contains fissile plutonium isotopes that can be combined with 238U to make mixed oxide (MOX) fuel. In this way the Pu from spent fuel is used in a new reactor cycle, contributing to the long-term sustainability of nuclear energy. The use of MOX fuels in thermal and fast reactors requires accurate capture and fission cross sections. For the particular case of 242Pu, the previous neutron capture cross section measurements were made in the 70’s, providing an uncertainty of about 35% in the keV region. In this context, the Nuclear Energy Agency recommends in its “High Priority Request List” and its report WPEC-26 that the capture cross section of 242Pu…
Fukushima, or the Black Swan of Nuclear Energy
2012
By its own merits, the great earthquake that hit Japan on 11 March 2011 would have qualified as one of the worse disasters of recent times. With a magnitude of 9.0 MW, it was the most powerful known earthquake ever to have hit Japan, and one of the most powerful in history. It released a surface energy 2 × 1017 Joule. Enough, if harnessed, to power a city the size of Los Angeles for an entire year.
Determination of a pre-heating sequence for the DONES Target Assembly
2021
Abstract Within the activities promoted by the EUROfusion consortium in support of the design and construction of the DEMO Oriented NEutron Source (DONES), a mock-up of its Target Assembly (TA), based on the configuration with a “bayonet” Back-Plate (BP) and available at ENEA Brasimone labs, is being adopted for the execution of experimental activities aiming at the validation of specific aspects of the target design. Despite the “integral”-TA concept is the current reference, experimental tests concerning the TA pre-heating phase are not significantly affected by the TA concept and are still representative even though conducted on the bayonet-TA concept. Indeed, the main objective of the p…
Multiphysics Optimization for First Wall Design Enhancement in Water-Cooled Breeding Blankets
2021
Abstract The commercial feasibility of the first fusion power plant generation adopting D-T plasma is strongly dependent upon the self-sustainability in terms of tritium fuelling. Within such a kind of reactor, the component selected to house the tritium breeding reactions is the breeding blanket, which is further assigned to heat power removal and radiation shielding functions. As a consequence of both its role and position, the breeding blanket is heavily exposed to both surface and volumetric heat loads and, hence, its design requires a typical multiphysics approach, from the neutronics to the thermo-mechanics. During last years, a great deal of effort has been put in the optimization of…
A Statistical Model of Spine Shape and Material for Population-Oriented Biomechanical Simulation
2021
In population-oriented ergonomics product design and musculoskeletal kinetics analysis, digital spine models of different shape, pose and material property are in great demand. The purpose of this study was to construct a parameterized finite element spine model with adjustable spine shape and material property. We used statistical shape model approach to learn inter-subject shape variations from 65 CT images of training subjects. Second order polynomial regression was used to model the age-dependent changes in vertebral material property derived from spatially aligned CT images. Finally, a parametric spine generator was developed to create finite element instances of different shapes and m…