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.
Luciano Burgazzi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 167 | Number 3 | September 2009 | Pages 339-347
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9074
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper focuses on the assessment of the hazards and safety critical areas and equipment related to the integral circulation experiments to be conducted on a molten lead-bismuth-eutectic-alloy facility, the CIRCulation Experiment (CIRCE) facility in Brasimone, Italy, for heavy-liquid-metal technology development. A well-structured failure mode and effect analysis procedure, customary in risk assessment studies, has been adopted to address the task, in order to obtain a complete picture of all the failure modes pertaining to the system, to determine its effects on the system and to classify them according to their severity.The analysis identified a major hazard relative to the facility in the experimental configuration to be the risk related to the water-lead-bismuth reaction, although with a very low probability, with the potential for steam explosion within the main vessel. This conclusion necessitates additional research on the concerned phenomena, both at the experimental and analytical levels, the results of which should help analysts quantify the risk and designers take the necessary provisions to cope with this risk.The analysis provides a set of accident initiators, that is, events postulated to initiate an accident situation, together with the total frequency and the list of component failures that could induce it. For any of them a deterministic analysis is suggested in order to verify the plant behavior with respect to accident transients, in terms of the parameters that can have an impact on accident analysis and modeling.