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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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NN Asks: What did you learn from ANS’s Nuclear 101?
Mike Harkin
When ANS first announced its new Nuclear 101 certificate course, I was excited. This felt like a course tailor-made for me, a transplant into the commercial nuclear world. I enrolled for the inaugural session held in November 2024, knowing it was going to be hard (this is nuclear power, of course)—but I had been working on ramping up my knowledge base for the past year, through both my employer and at a local college.
The course was a fast-and-furious roller-coaster ride through all the key components of the nuclear power industry, in one highly challenging week. In fact, the challenges the students experienced caught even the instructors by surprise. Thankfully, the shared intellectual stretch we students all felt helped us band together to push through to the end.
We were all impressed with the quality of the instructors, who are some of the top experts in the field. We appreciated not only their knowledge base but their support whenever someone struggled to understand a concept.
Aya Diab, Michael Corradini
Nuclear Technology | Volume 169 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 97-113
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9355
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
CANDU reactors are pressurized heavy water-moderated and heavy water-cooled reactor designs. During commissioning of nuclear power plants, a range of possible accidents must be considered to assure a plant's robust design. Consider a complete channel blockage in the CANDU reactor. Such an extreme flow blockage event would result in fuel overheating, pressure tube failure, partial melting of fuel rods, and possible molten fuel-moderator interactions (MFMIs). The MFMI phenomenon would occur immediately after the pressure tube rupture and would involve a mixture of steam, hydrogen, and molten fuel being ejected into the surrounding moderator water in the form of a high-pressure vapor bubble mixture. This bubble mixture would accelerate the surrounding denser water, causing interfacial mixing due to hydrodynamic instabilities at the interface. As a result of these interfacial instabilities, water is entrained into the growing two-phase bubble mixture with attendant mass and heat transfer, e.g., water vaporization and fuel oxidation. A comprehensive model has been developed to investigate these complex phenomena resulting from a postulated complete flow blockage and complete pressure tube failure. This dynamic model serves as a baseline to characterize the pressure response due to a pressure tube rupture and the associated MFMI phenomena. Theoretical modeling of these interrelated complex phenomena is not known a priori, and therefore, a semiempirical approach is adopted.