ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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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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Latest News
College students help develop waste measuring device at Hanford
A partnership between Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) and Washington State University has resulted in the development of a device to measure radioactive and chemical tank waste at the Hanford Site. WRPS is the contractor at Hanford for the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
Sang Ji Kim, Pham Nhu Viet Ha, Jae Yong Lim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 194 | Number 3 | June 2016 | Pages 340-352
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-53
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An advanced sodium-cooled fast reactor concept has been developed in Korea for transuranics (TRU) transmutation with an electricity output of 600 MW(electric) (called the KALIMER-600 TRU burner). The core design philosophy is primarily based on passive safety mechanisms to meet the Generation IV technology goals. Accordingly, metal fuel has been adopted to enhance its inherent passive safety characteristics. The charged fuel in a ternary metal alloy (U-TRU-Zr) consists of self-recycled TRU and TRU recovered from the spent nuclear fuels of current light water reactors through a pyro-metallurgical process, which is assumed to carry over 5% of the inventory of rare earth (RE) elements. It has been recognized that an additional amount of RE in the fuel would decrease the material attractiveness of the charged fuel with respect to proliferation resistance and physical protection (PR&PP). However, this may raise concerns because most of the reactor physics parameters will tend to negatively affect the passive safety features encoded in the original core concept. Thus, this study investigates the impact of the RE recovery fraction on the core physics performance and important safety parameters such as Doppler coefficients and sodium void reactivity. The results are expected to help provide guidance regarding the development of limiting conditions for RE contents to recycling technology flow sheet developers and ternary metal fuel developers, and to provide insight into optimizing the core passive safety characteristics under accident conditions should a significant amount of RE be needed to enhance PR&PP.