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The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Sipeng Wang, Bao-Wen Yang, Zhaobo Zhou, Jianping Long
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 14-32
Critical Review – Selected papers from NURETH 2017 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1512791
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermal-hydraulic characteristics of nuclear reactors under ocean conditions are significant for reactor safety and reliability. A large number of experiments concerning this issue have been done. However, the focus of these experiments has been mainly on dynamical systems in submarines and aircraft carriers. With the development of floating nuclear power plants (FNPPs)—which are used to provide power for remote areas or ocean platforms—more studies on FNPPs are needed. The differences between FNPPs and dynamical systems bring new challenges to research of thermal-hydraulic characteristics in a nuclear reactor under ocean conditions.
Many experimental studies on natural circulation and forced circulation under ocean conditions are based on tube and rectangular channels. The effects of ocean motions on friction, flow instability, heat transfer, and critical heat flux (CHF) have been investigated. The intensity of ocean motions and their driving head have a huge impact on pressure drop, heat transfer, and flow instability, especially when the driving head is small. Flow oscillations induced by ocean motions can overlap with thermal-induced flow instability. This resonance effect can cause potential harm to systems. CHF under ocean conditions is mainly dependent on motion types and the CHF mechanism.
There are challenges with this research. First, conclusions obtained from a simple channel cannot always extend to rod bundle systems. Second, studies of ocean conditions, which always use one- or two-dimensional movements, are relatively simple and cannot reflect complicated ocean environments. Third, there is a lack of comparison between natural frequency of two-phase flow instability and frequency of ocean waves, and this may cause unwanted problems due to resonance or coupling behaviors. Fourth, CHF experiments that are performed to examine CHF events under ocean conditions are far from real reactor conditions where CHF events occur under high-temperature and high-pressure conditions, with complicated three-dimensional geometry, with open channel environments, and sometimes even under the influence of mixing vane grids [for most small modular reactor designs]. Last, there has been no work on the length effect, nonuniform heating, and mixing effect induced by spacer grids, which differentiate FNPP thermal-hydraulic characteristics from the other applications. A series of suggestions are provided for future work.