Reactor vessel internals are structures located within the reactor vessel that support and orient the reactor fuel assemblies and direct coolant flow through the core. The core basket is part of the internals structure, which consists of vertical plates that surround the outer faces of the hexagonal peripheral fuel assemblies. The vertical plates are bolted to the edges of horizontal former pla...

Damage to plasma-facing components (PFCs) and structural materials during abnormal plasma behavior such as hard disruptions, edge-localized modes (ELMs), and vertical displacement events (VDEs) is considered a serious life-limiting concern for these components. The PFCs in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), such as the divertor, limiter and parts of the first wall, wil...

So far 22 criticality accidents have been reported (McLaughlin et al., 2000) including JCO accident in Japan. All cases took place with fuel solution or slurry except one case of metal fuel. It was not clear that what was actually happening during those criticality accidents except the JCO accident, for which a fission power profile was reproduced from a gammaray monitoring data (Tonoike et al....

The principle drawbacks of any kind of solid nuclear fuel are listed and briefly analysed in the first part of the paper. On the basis of this analysis, the liquid fuel concept and its benefits are introduced and briefly described in the following parts of the paper allowing to develop new reactor systems for nuclear incineration of spent fuel from conventional reactors and a new clean source o...

A new acoustical sensing system for the nuclear power industry has been developed at The Pennsylvania State University in collaboration with Idaho National Laboratories. This sensor uses the high temperatures of nuclear fuel to convert a nuclear fuel rod into a standing-wave thermoacoustic engine. When a standing wave is generated, the sound wave within the fuel rod will be propagated, by acous...

This paper investigates whether a fusion power plant could be designed to be passively proliferation-proof. Even low neutron production rates enable fissile-fuel breeding, so such a fusion reactor must burn neutron-lean fuels. To burn these fuels economically requires a highpower-density fusion concept, and a D-He field-reversed configuration will be analyzed here. The paper discusses physics a...

In the broad framework of nuclear power plants (NPPs) industry, dynamic probabilistic risk assessment could answer time dependence deficiency event tree and fault analysis. The basic approach relies on experts’ pre-constructed accident sequences without exploring time-dependent nature an scenario, which strongly affect sequence. Conversely, effects events timing can be studied by adopting a (DE...