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In conventional water-cooled designs, a significant amount of effort is needed to ensure that the materials making up the reactor do not dissolve or corrode into the water. Many common low-corrosion materials are not suitable for reactor use because they are not strong enough to withstand the high pressures being used, or are too easily ...
Sodium and NaK (a eutectic sodium-potassium alloy) do not corrode steel to any significant degree and are compatible with many nuclear fuels, allowing for a wide choice of structural materials. NaK was used as the coolant in the first breeder reactor prototype, the Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 , in 1951.
The driving force that causes metals to corrode is a consequence of their temporary existence in metallic form. To produce metals starting from naturally occurring minerals and ores, it is necessary to provide a certain amount of energy, e.g. Iron ore in a blast furnace.
Fusion reactors can be designed using "low activation", materials that do not easily become radioactive. Vanadium, for example, becomes much less radioactive than stainless steel. [135] Carbon fiber materials are also low-activation, are strong and light, and are promising for laser-inertial reactors where a magnetic field is not required. [136]
Fission product yields by mass for thermal neutron fission of U-235 and Pu-239 (the two typical of current nuclear power reactors) and U-233 (used in the thorium cycle). This page discusses each of the main elements in the mixture of fission products produced by nuclear fission of the common nuclear fuels uranium and plutonium.
In metallurgy, non-ferrous metals are metals or alloys that do not contain iron (allotropes of iron, ferrite, and so on) in appreciable amounts.. Generally more costly than ferrous metals, non-ferrous metals are used because of desirable properties such as low weight (e.g. aluminium), higher conductivity (e.g. copper), [1] non-magnetic properties or resistance to corrosion (e.g. zinc). [2]
Demand for the metals is expected to soar up to seven times current levels by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. Yet US supply remains small. Its only large scale rare earths mine ...
Fusion reactions can be categorized according to their neutronicity: the fraction of the fusion energy released as energetic neutrons. The State of New Jersey defined an aneutronic reaction as one in which neutrons carry no more than 1% of the total released energy, [20] although many papers on the subject [21] include reactions that do not meet this criterion.