Publications related to Nuclear fission

Atomic level insight into irradiation effects in nuclear fuel materials

Microstructural evolution during in-pile irradiation, radiation damage effects and fission products behavior in UO2 nuclear fuel are key issues in understanding and for the modeling of the performance as well as safety characteristics of nuclear fuels in t ...

EPFL2024

Neutron-Gamma Noise Measurements in a Zero-Power Reactor Using Organic Scintillators

Andreas Pautz, Vincent Pierre Lamirand, Oskari Ville Pakari

Noise measurements in light water reactor systems aid in generating validation data for integral point kinetic parameter predictions and generating monitoring parameters for reactor safety and safeguards. The CROCUS zero-power reactor has been used to supp ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Gamma-ray Spectroscopy in Low-Power Nuclear Research Reactors

Andreas Pautz, Vincent Pierre Lamirand, Oskari Ville Pakari

Gamma-ray spectroscopy is an effective technique for radioactive material characterization, routine inventory verification, nuclear safeguards, health physics, and source search scenarios. Gamma-ray spectrometers typically cannot be operated in the immedia ...

MDPI2024

Controlling On-Surface Photoactivity: The Impact of π-Conjugation in Anhydride-Functionalized Molecules on a Semiconductor Surface

Karl-Heinz Ernst, Christian Wäckerlin

On-surface synthesis has become a prominent method for growing low-dimensional carbon-based nanomaterials on metal surfaces. However, the necessity of decoupling organic nanostructures from metal substrates to exploit their properties requires either trans ...

Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH2024

Monte Carlo analysis of BWR geometries using a cycle check-up methodology

Mathieu Hursin, Hakim Ferroukhi, Dimitri Rochman, Abdelhamid Dokhane, Alexander Vasiliev

Recent fuel anomalies at a Swiss power plant have motivated the development at PSI of the "Cycle Check-Up" (CHUP) methodology which consists in performing Monte Carlo transport calculations using nuclide compositions and thermal-hydraulic boundary conditio ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2023

Design of an Instrumented Fuel Rod for Intra-pin Neutron Flux Measurements in the CROCUS Experimental Reactor

Andreas Pautz, Vincent Pierre Lamirand, Mathieu Hursin, Thomas Jean-François Ligonnet, Won Dong Shin, Tom Mager

In response to the need for validating high-fidelity deterministic neutronics solvers capable of pin-resolved neutron flux distributions, an instrumented fuel rod was designed for the experimental reactor CROCUS, operated by EPFL’s Laboratory for Reactor P ...

2023

Electromagnetic processes of nuclear excitation: from direct photoabsorption to free electron and muon capture

Simone Gargiulo

In the vast expanse of the Universe and on our planet, nuclei exist in a state of excitement. These excited nuclear states (isomers) can persist for varying periods, from fractions of a second to billions of years and beyond, before decaying to their groun ...

EPFL2023

Nuclear Excitation by Free Muon Capture

Fabrizio Carbone, Ivan Madan, Simone Gargiulo

Efficient excitation of nuclei via exchange of a real or virtual photon has a fundamental importance for nuclear science and technology development. Here, we present a mechanism of nuclear excitation based on the capture of a free muon into the atomic orbi ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2022

High accuracy measurement of the prompt neutron decay constant in CROCUS using Gamma Noise and bootstrapped uncertainties

Andreas Pautz, Vincent Pierre Lamirand, Oskari Ville Pakari, Pavel Frajtag, Tom Mager

We experimentally demonstrate the advantages of gamma detection for noise measurements to deter-mine the prompt neutron decay constant a of a nuclear reactor using the power spectral density (PSD) method, coupled to a new uncertainty estimation scheme base ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2022

Data-Driven Predictive Models: Calculational Bias in Characterization of Spent Nuclear Fuel

Characteristics of the spent nuclear fuel (SNF) are typically calculated, requiring validation a priori. The validation process relies on the difference between calculations and measurements, namely the bias. Usually, predicting the bias based on benchmark ...

EPFL2022

A concept for the extraction of the most refractory elements at CERN-ISOLDE as carbonyl complex ions

João Pedro Fernandes Pinto Ramos

We introduce a novel thick-target concept tailored to the extraction of refractory 4d and 5d transition metal radionuclides of molybdenum, technetium, ruthenium and tungsten for radioactive ion beam production. Despite the more than 60-year old history of ...

2022

Design and performance of a small bath cryostat with NMR capability for transport of hyperpolarized samples

Andrea Capozzi

As of today, dissolution Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (dDNP) is the only clinically available hyperpolarization technique for C-13-MRI. Despite the clear path towards personalized medicine that dDNP is paving as an alternative and/or complement to Positron ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Comparison of JET-C DD neutron rates independently predicted by the ASCOT and TRANSP Monte Carlo heating codes

Henri Weisen

Simulations of the DD neutron rates predicted by the ASCOT and TRANSP Monte Carlo heating codes for a diverse set of JET-C (JET with carbon plasma facing components) plasmas are compared. A previous study (Weisen et al 2017 Nucl. Fusion 57 076029) of this ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2022

Towards the Validation of Noise Experiments in the CROCUS Reactor Using the TRIPOLI-4 Monte Carlo Code in Analog Mode

Andreas Pautz, Vincent Pierre Lamirand, Oskari Ville Pakari

Intrinsic neutron noise experiments offer a non-invasive manner to measure the prompt decay constant or reactivity of fissile systems. Using the fluctuations in the density of fission chains, one can infer the kinetics parameters via correlation analysis s ...

2021

Interface Tracking Investigation of the Sliding Bubbles Effects on Heat Transfer in the Laminar Regime

Konstantin Mikityuk, Lubomír Bures

Helium gases are utilized to remove fission products from the molten salt fast reactor (MSFR) core during operation. Helium gases and other volatile fission products may be introduced into the intermediate heat exchanger channels. The effect of these gases ...

2022

Growth and viability of microorganisms in bentonite and their potential activity in deep geological repository environments

Niels Burzan

Radioactive waste is among the most dangerous anthropogenic waste and its safe disposal is a challenging multi-generational task. Many nations have sought for the peaceful application of nuclear fission for the reliable production of electric energy to pow ...

EPFL2021

Heteroatom oxidation controls singlet-triplet energy splitting in singlet fission building blocks

Anne-Clémence Corminboeuf, Sergio Vela Llausi, Yuri Cho, Maria Fumanal Quintana, Jacob Terence Blaskovits

Singlet fission (SF) is a promising multiexciton-generating process. Its demanding energy splitting criterion - that the S-1 energy must be at least twice that of T-1 - has limited the range of materials capable of SF. We propose heteroatom oxidation as a ...

Royal Society of Chemistry2022

A Hybrid Approach to Neutron Transport with Thermal-hydraulic Feedback for Reactor Transient Analysis

Alexander Aures

Understanding the time-dependent behaviour of a nuclear reactor following an intended or unintended change of the reactor conditions is of crucial importance to the safe operation of nuclear reactors. Safety evaluations of nuclear reactors involve the anal ...

EPFL2021

Design of the third-generation lead-based neutron spallation target for the neutron time-of-flight facility at CERN

Roland Logé, Nicola Colonna, Raffaele Esposito

The neutron time-of-flight (n_TOF) facility at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) is a pulsed white-spectrum neutron spallation source producing neutrons for two experimental areas: the Experimental Area 1 (EAR1), located 185 m horizontall ...

2021

The fragmentation mechanism of gold nanoparticles in water under femtosecond laser irradiation

Marcel Drabbels, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Ulrich Lorenz, Jonathan Mark Voss, Pavel Olshin, Chengcheng Yan

Plasmonic nanoparticles in aqueous solution have long been known to fragment under irradiation with intense ultrafast laser pulses, creating progeny particles with diameters of a few nanometers. However, the mechanism of this process is still intensely deb ...

2021