Week 32 of 2024
Three nuclear energy innovation news!
🔎 Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (US) create the first-ever custom glass test cell for molten salt reactors. It will be used to better understand the complex chemistry and multi-phase physics (e.g. bubbles impacting reactor neutronics and thermohydraulic performances) of molten salt fuels.
💥 First Light Fusion (UK) partners with KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and National Research council (Italy) to research the damage caused by supersonic dust impacts in tokamak fusion devices. While this topic is not directly relevant for First Light Fusion, which focused on inertial fusion, its two-stage light-gas gun driver is a useful facility. A few milligrams of molybdenum or tungsten dust particles have been launched inside a hollow projectile, which was then accelerated to a velocity of 2 km/s onto a target cooled down to -100°C to mimic the cryogenic conditions in some tokamaks.
🌞 A team from the MIT and the Berkeley Lab develop a computational model for designing simple and streamlined radiation sensor setups that can identify the direction of a source of radiation. The basic principle is to use Tetris-inspired detector pixels, using inter-pixel padding for enhancing contrast between pixels and neural networks trained with Monte Carlo simulation data. By moving the sensor around to get multiple readings, the technology is capable of providing cross-referenced bearings to give a precise location.
👨🎓 Paper of the week: "Mechanical Detection of Nuclear Decays", Physical Review Letters (2024)
👉 Detection of individual alpha nuclear decays in the recoil of a levitating sphere - a flabergastingly precise measurement on an object 10^12 more massive than the emitted particles.
👇 Did you spot anything else? Let me me know!
