ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Kwang-Yong Kim, Jun-Woo Seo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 149 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 62-70
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-A3579
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the present work, the shape of a mixing vane in a pressurized water reactor fuel assembly has been optimized numerically using three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes analysis of the flow and heat transfer to find the effects of flow characteristics downstream of the mixing vane on heat transfer augmentation and also to optimize the shape of the mixing vane to increase the resistance to departure from nucleate boiling by enhancing the heat transfer without excessive pressure loss. The response surface method is employed as an optimization technique. The objective function is defined as a combination of the heat transfer rate and the inverse of friction loss with weighting factor. The bend angle and base length of the mixing vane are selected as design variables. In most of the numerical experiments, both the heat transfer and friction loss are enhanced as the bend angle and base length increase. The swirl and cross-flow characteristics and thermal-hydraulic performances of different shapes of mixing vane are discussed. From the results, the close relationship between the swirl factor and the heat transfer rate has been found. In the specified ranges of the design variables, the sensitivity of the objective function to the base length is only about one-tenth of the sensitivity to the bend angle. Nine points for numerical experiments were sufficient for construction of a reliable response surface. The optimum shape has been obtained as a function of the weighting factor in the objective function.