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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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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.
Chang H. Oh, J. Han, R. Barner, E. S. Kim, S. Sherman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 166 | Number 1 | April 2009 | Pages 113-120
Technical Note | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A6973
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The U.S. Department of Energy and Idaho National Laboratory are developing a next-generation nuclear plant, very high temperature gas-cooled reactor (VHTR) to serve as a demonstration of state-of-the-art nuclear technology. The purpose of the demonstration is twofold: (a) efficient low-cost energy generation and (b) hydrogen production. While hydrogen production and advanced energy cycles are still in the early stages of development, research toward coupling VHTR, electrical generation, and hydrogen production is under way.This technical note includes the coupling of a VHTR with a power conversion unit. One of the power conversion configurations in the coupled plant is a combined Brayton cycle and Rankine cycle. This configuration uses a mixture of helium and nitrogen that allows the use of modified gas-turbine technology, including the same design techniques, material, and testing facilities used for conventional air gas turbines, to be used for the VHTR electricity production application. Exhaust heat from the turbine is transferred to a heat exchanger where the transferred heat is used to generate steam for a Rankine cycle.The study was focused on the verification of the steam generator model and comparisons of results from HYSYS and RELAP5-3D. This technical note concludes that the overall results are in good agreement despite the differences in size of different flow regime lengths. The overall heat transfer behavior deviated within ~2.1%, and exit temperatures and temperature drops across the steam generator also show reasonable agreement with <5.1% difference between the two methods.