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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.
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.
Stella Maris Oggianu, Hee Cheon No, Mujid S. Kazimi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 3 | September 2003 | Pages 256-269
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3415
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A strategy is proposed for the assessment of nuclear fuel material economic potential use in future light water reactors (LWRs). In this methodology, both the required enrichment and the fuel performance limits are considered. In order to select the best fuel candidate, the optimal burnup that produces the lowest annual fuel cost within the burnup potential for a given fuel material and smear density ratio is determined.Several nuclear materials are presented as examples of the application of the methodology proposed in this paper. The alternative fuels considered include uranium dioxide (UO2), uranium carbide (UC), uranium nitride (UN), metallic uranium (U-Zr alloy), combined thorium and uranium oxides (ThO2/UO2), and combined thorium and uranium metals (U/Th). For these examples, a typical LWR lattice geometry in a zirconium-based cladding was assumed. The uncertainties in the results presented are large due to the scarcity of experimental data regarding the behavior of the considered materials at high burnups. Also, chemical compatibility issues are to be considered separately.The same methodology can be applied in the future to evaluate the economic potential of other nuclear fuel materials including different cladding designs, dispersions of ceramics into ceramics, dispersions of ceramics into metals, and also for geometries other than the traditional circular fuel pin.