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Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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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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Excelsior University student section awarded community education grant
The American Nuclear Society Student Section at Excelsior University in Albany, N.Y., was awarded a $5,000 grant from the ANS Student Section Strategic Fund initiative for its program, Empowering Tomorrow’s Nuclear Innovators: A Collaborative Approach to Nuclear Technology Education and Awareness.
David P. Weber
Nuclear Technology | Volume 45 | Number 3 | October 1979 | Pages 203-218
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A32291
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The assessment of the consequences of hypothetical accidents in liquid-metal-cooled fast reactors often requires interaction between analysis and in-pile experiments, where experiments must provide geometry, boundary conditions, and thermal profiles that are prototypical of the accident scenario. Neutronic heating of test samples initially produces atypical thermal profiles, and a time period is required to elapse for thermal inversion. An analytic transient heat conduction analysis using multiregion eigenfunctions is provided to determine the space-time temperature profiles. With an assumed weak temporal dependence for eigenfunctions greater than the first, a determination of the motion of the position of maximum temperature is made, leading to a simple expression for the time to thermally invert completely, which requires knowledge of only the first eigenvalue and the expansion coefficient of the source for the fundamental mode, with similar analysis providing an estimate of the time to reach melting. A functional relationship is established between the operating reactor power, the thermal properties of the materials, and the boundary conditions to ensure satisfaction of both criteria of rapid thermal inversion and maximum temperatures above prescribed levels, such as melting. The analysis is then applied to a proposed in-pile experiment for studying pool boilup in internally heated fuel-steel pools with nuclear heated walls. It is shown that for a variety of external boundary conditions, a reactor power level may be chosen to ensure integrity of the insulating wall while simulating the pool boilup phenomena without the necessity of enrichment grading to enhance thermal inversion.