State of the Art of Pyroprocessing Technology in Japan

AbstractMinor actinide recycling in a fuel cycle is a potential technology to minimize the environmental radioactivity burden in waste disposal in the fast reactor era after 2050. Pyroprocessing technology with metal electrorefining expects that no additional process is required to separate minor actinides and short- cooled fuels can be treated due to no-use of organic solvent that degrades by radiation. Pyroprocessing has been explored for metal fuel cycle and nitride fuel cycle in Japan. Metal fuel fast reactor, which can achieve a high breeding ratio over 1.3, and its fuel cycle is a compact system by integrating pyroprocessing. Oxide fuel can be also treated by converting to metals by reduction. Separation of transuranium elements from high level liquid waste originating from aqueous reprocessing has been challenged. Verification of the process and development of an engineering scale device are the current interests for study. In addition, irradiation study of metal fuel with minor actinides currently much advances from the point of fundamental investigation. Accelerator-driven system (ADS) for transmutation of minor actinides is integrated with pyroprocessing for recycling system. The denitriding at anode and azotizing at cathode together with electrorefining have been fundamentally studied by use of plutonium

Designing spontaneous behavioral switching via chaotic itinerancy

Chaotic itinerancy is a frequently observed phenomenon in high-dimensional and nonlinear dynamical systems, and it is characterized by the random transitions among multiple quasi-attractors. Several studies have revealed that chaotic itinerancy has been observed in brain activity, and it is considered to play a critical role in the spontaneous, stable behavior generation of animals. Thus, chaotic itinerancy is a topic of great interest, particularly for neurorobotics researchers who wish to understand and implement autonomous behavioral controls for agents. However, it is generally difficult to gain control over high-dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems. Hence, the implementation of chaotic itinerancy has mainly been accomplished heuristically. In this study, we propose a novel way of implementing chaotic itinerancy reproducibly and at will in a generic high-dimensional chaotic system. In particular, we demonstrate that our method enables us to easily design both the trajectories of quasi-attractors and the transition rules among them simply by adjusting the limited number of system parameters and by utilizing the intrinsic high-dimensional chaos. Finally, we quantitatively discuss the validity and scope of application through the results of several numerical experiments.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures and 1 supplementary figure. Our supplementary videos are available in https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10iB23OMHQfFIRejZstoXMJRpnpm3-3H5?usp=sharin

HIGH-LOADING ABSORPTION CHARACTERISTICS OF NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL TURFS

The present study was designed to illustrate shock attenuation characteristics of natural turf as a target property for long pile artificial turf (3-g turf) and to compare the property with that of existing 3-g turf systems. A recently proposed new high loading test was conducted to detect the initial state of shock attenuation property of natural turfs with two different bases (sod and sand base) and of 3-g turfs with three different infills (sand, rubber and sand/rubber). Clear differences between these turfs were observed as the natural turfs are having a higher impact damping and a larger hysteresis with plastic surface deformation. Those features would be beneficial in lowering a high load imparted to the human body but might limit player’s performance