Monday, November 28, 2011, 3105 Etcheverry Hall, 4-5pm

EM2 and Spinoff Technologies

Robert Schleicher

Senior Scientist for Advanced Reactors

General Atomics

 EM2 is a helium-cooled fast reactor with a conversion ratio of near unity. It has a 30 year core life and is able to burn spent LWR fuel without reprocessing. An update of the technical developments in EM2 since the last Berkeley colloquium will be given. The update will include design changes and improvements as well as progress on fuel fabrication and SiC composite development. EM2 has fostered a number of spinoff technologies that are actively being pursued including SiC composite clad for LWRs, high-speed turbo-generators and EM3, a small, molten-salt cooled, autonomous version of EM2.

October 3, 2011 at 4pm: 3105 Etcheverry Hall

Nicholas D. Scielzo 

Jean Pouliot, UC San Francisco

Radiation therapy, alone or in combination with other modalities, is involved in the treatment of a majority of cancers, is practiced in every clinic and used to treat practically every site of the body. The field of radiation oncology is a perfect example of a multidisciplinary environment requiring expertise of people from widely different backgrounds. In order to control the tumor and cure the cancer patient, one needs to deliver a high dose to cancer cells, drawing on concepts related to radiation, energy, radiobiology, imaging, computation and statistics. By understanding those concepts, the medical physicist plays a key role and allows the team members to safely and effectively use radiation in the treatment of cancer.

Eric Pitcher, Los Alamos National Laboratory

September 19, 2011

The proposed Materials Test Station, to be built at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, will use the high-power proton beam from the LANSCE accelerator to create an intense neutron irradiation environment for nuclear materials testing. The primary mission is to test advanced fuels and materials for fast reactor applications, including fuels bearing minor actinides, in support of the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy's Fuel Cycle R&D program. Damage rates of up to 15 dpa per year in iron can be achieved within the fuel irradiation region. Not only can the MTS perform integral testing of fuel rodlets subjected to prototypic fast reactor conditions, it is also well suited to conducting separate effects experiments that are critically important to understanding the underlying processes that contribute to fuel aging and ultimately fuel failure. Separate effects testing of the type than can be conducted in MTS can validate modeling efforts that are used to simulate fuel performance.