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Category: nuclear energy

UPTON, N.Y. — High temperatures and ionizing radiation create extremely corrosive environments inside a nuclear reactor. To design long-lasting reactors, scientists must understand how radiation-induced chemical reactions impact structural materials. Chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory recently performed experiments showing that radiation-induced reactions may help mitigate the corrosion of reactor metals in a new type of reactor cooled by molten salts. Their findings are published in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.

“Molten salt reactors are an emerging technology for safer, scalable nuclear energy production. These advanced reactors can operate at higher, more efficient temperatures than traditional water-cooled reactor technologies while maintaining relatively ambient pressure,” explained James Wishart, a distinguished chemist at Brookhaven Lab and leader of the research.

Unlike water-cooled reactors, molten salt reactors use a coolant made entirely of positively and negatively charged ions, which remain in a liquid state only at high temperatures. It’s similar to melting table salt crystals until they flow without adding any other liquid.

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Research teams have established a theoretical method for designing smooth curved wall surfaces with variable cross-section shock tubes, and developed an integrated, high-intensity multifunctional shock tube device. Led by Prof. Luo Xisheng and Prof. Si Ting from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the study was published in Review of Scientific Instruments.

Based on the device and techniques, the research team further developed a discontinuous perturbation interface generation technology, pioneering the experimental and mechanistic study of strong shock wave impact on single-mode fluid interface instability in shock tubes. The results were published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

Shock wave-induced fluid interface instability is a common key scientific issue in aerospace vehicles and inertial confinement , while the related basic theories are still insufficient. Shock tubes are often employed to carry out basic aerodynamics research. However, the controllable generation of regularly-shaped, high-energy utilization converging and strong shock waves still remains a challenge.

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Top minds at the world’s largest atom smasher have released a blueprint for a much bigger successor that could vastly improve research into the remaining enigmas of physics.

The plans for the Future Circular Collider—a nearly 91-kilometer (56.5-mile) loop along the French-Swiss border and below Lake Geneva—published late Monday put the finishing details on a project roughly a decade in the making at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The FCC would carry out high-precision experiments in the mid-2040s to study “known physics” in greater detail, then enter a second phase—planned for 2070—that would conduct high-energy collisions of protons and heavy ions that would “open the door to the unknown,” said Giorgio Chiarelli, a research director at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics.

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An international team led by Rutgers University-New Brunswick researchers has merged two lab-synthesized materials into a synthetic quantum structure once thought impossible to exist and produced an exotic structure expected to provide insights that could lead to new materials at the core of quantum computing.

The work, described in a cover story in the journal Nano Letters, explains how four years of continuous experimentation led to a novel method to design and build a unique, tiny sandwich composed of distinct atomic layers.

One slice of the microscopic structure is made of dysprosium titanate, an inorganic compound used in nuclear reactors to trap and contain elusive magnetic monopole particles, while the other is composed of pyrochlore iridate, a new magnetic semimetal mainly used in today’s experimental research due to its distinctive electronic, topological and magnetic properties.

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Nuclear fusion is a source of great hope for future energy security, with this field being explored in research reactors around the world. Accurately detecting their performance requires measurement systems that supply valid data even under extreme conditions. And the centerpiece of those systems are the bolometers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems IMM. Experts from the institute will be presenting their sophisticated sensors at the joint Fraunhofer booth (Hall 2, Booth B24) at this year’s Hannover Messe trade show from March 31 to April 4.

Fusion technology could be the solution to the increasing energy needs of the growing global population, but it is a highly demanding technology. The current challenge is to carry out experiments that produce more energy than they consume. To accurately capture advances in this field, specialists need exceptionally sensitive measuring instruments to analyze and control the complex processes taking place inside the reactors. Determining how much power is emitted from the fusion plasma is crucial to this.

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A newly developed framework for quantifying uncertainties enhances the predictive power of analog quantum simulations. Simulating quantum many-body systems is a major objective in nuclear and high-energy physics. These systems involve large numbers of interacting particles governed by the laws of

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Studies that explore how the denser sections of atoms, known as atomic nuclei, interact with neutrons (i.e., particles with no electric charge) can have valuable implications both for the understanding of these atoms’ underlying physics and for the development of nuclear energy solutions. A process that is central to these interactions is neutron capture, which entails the absorption of a neutron by a nucleus, followed by the emission of gamma-rays.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the origin of the exceptional neutron capture capabilities of the zirconium-88 (88 Zr), using a new experimental methodology. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, offer valuable insight that could help to improve existing nuclear and astrophysical models.

“The probability (per unit area) of a nucleus capturing a neutron at a given kinetic energy is called neutron-capture cross section,” Thanos Stamatopoulos, first author of the paper, told Phys.org. “The probability across several kinetic energies from 0.5 eV up to infinity is called resonance integral. Typically, in nature, when the cross section for neutrons with a kinetic energy of 25 meV (thermal cross section) is very large, the resonance integral is small.”

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The oceans hold an enormous amount of very diluted uranium that could potentially serve as a sustainable fuel source for nuclear power. But how can uranium be extracted quickly and efficiently from seawater?

Balancing high selectivity for ions with rapid transport of those ions has long been a major challenge in obtaining uranium from the sea. Now a groundbreaking study suggests a solution.

A research team led by Prof. Wen Liping from the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a biomimetic adsorbent that can attract and hold uranium ions. The inspiration for this adsorbent is the natural porous structure of the spiky, globular fruit of the Chinese sweetgum tree, Liquidambar formosana. The team’s findings were recently published in Matter.

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