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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
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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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.
Rafael Macian, Paul Coddington
Nuclear Technology | Volume 139 | Number 3 | September 2002 | Pages 185-204
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3313
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
RETRAN-3D, a system analysis code currently employed by the nuclear industry in studies covering a wide variety of operational and accident scenarios, has not been extensively validated for application to loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) scenarios.The results of the in-depth analysis of two experimental loss-of-coolant transients, namely, Test No. 9 in the French OMEGA facility, and the International Standard Problem 26 (ISP-26) in the Japanese ROSA-IV Facility are discussed. The OMEGA test simulated the blowdown phase of a double-ended cold-leg break, whereas the ISP-26 test simulated a small break (5%) in a full height, volume (1/48), and power (~1/342) scaled facility representing a typical two (or four)-loop pressurized water reactor (PWR) system.The RETRAN-3D results for the OMEGA test show good estimates of the important system parameters, with the best agreement corresponding to the use of the dynamic-slip flow model. A sensitivity analysis on the break flow showed that the Henry/Fauske-Isoenthalpic Expansion critical flow model yields the best results, which are significantly improved with a refined nodalization upstream of the break.The ISP-26 was also simulated using the dynamic-slip flow model. The results indicate that the code is able to calculate a small-break LOCA with a model including the main PWR system components and to reproduce the principal physical processes in a reasonable manner.In summary, this assessment shows the ability of RETRAN-3D to model LOCA scenarios in a reasonable way and also points to areas where further model improvement could result in more accurate simulations.