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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
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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Latest News
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Felix C. Difilippo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 143 | Number 3 | March 2003 | Pages 240-253
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE02-34
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a series of well-documented benchmark experiments were performed at the Proteus facility of the Swiss Paul Scherrer Institute. Thirteen critical pebble bed reactor configurations were assembled, with ten of them deterministic with a precise location of the low-enriched fuel and moderator pebbles. Seven of these configurations were modeled with a very high spatial resolution with the Monte Carlo code MCNP with details that go from the fuel kernel (0.5 mm in diameter) to the walls surrounding the facility. The calculations of the k's of the configurations agree quite well with the experiments (within a fraction of a dollar). A sensitivity analysis is included to discuss the possibility of a small bias; also biases introduced by customary approximations of production codes were calculated. The experiments and the analysis of this paper might be very useful tools to check the calculational accuracy of procedures used in the emerging work related to pebble bed modular gas-cooled reactors.