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The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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June 16–19, 2024
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Strong performances across the board
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
Another year, another stellar performance by America’s nuclear plants. We’ve come to expect high capacity factors, and it’s a credit to the men and women of the profession. They’ve made routine something that was unimaginable not so long ago.
The decadal challenge for the nuclear enterprise now is to maintain this high level of operational excellence for the current fleet, while at the same time ushering in a new generation of technologies at scale. It will be a big job—but one that seems more and more likely with each passing day.
Leo K. Sepold, Alexei Miassoedov, Gerhard Schanz, Ulrike Stegmaier, Martin Steinbrück, Juri Stuckert, Christoph Homann
Nuclear Technology | Volume 147 | Number 2 | August 2004 | Pages 202-215
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT04-A3526
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The QUENCH bundle experiments together with pertinent separate-effects tests are run to investigate the hydrogen source term resulting from water injection into an uncovered core of a light water reactor for emergency cooling. The test bundle consists of 21 fuel rod simulators, 20 of which are heated electrically over a length of 1024 mm. The center rod is either an unheated fuel rod simulator or a control rod containing B4C absorber material. The Zircaloy-4 rod cladding and the grid spacers are identical to those used in pressurized water reactors, whereas the fuel is represented by ZrO2 pellets. After transient heating to 2000 K and above, cooling of the test bundle is accomplished by injecting water or steam into the bottom of the test section. Hydrogen generation during cooling was found either to stop almost immediately or to increase for a certain time. Increased hydrogen generation was found in those tests in which local melting occurred, probably as a result of oxidation of the melt containing zirconium. Hydrogen release in the flooding/cooling phase of all QUENCH experiments performed so far seems to be insensitive to the coolant (water or steam) under similar test conditions.