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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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Researchers use one-of-a-kind expertise and capabilities to test fuels of tomorrow
At the Idaho National Laboratory Hot Fuel Examination Facility, containment box operator Jake Maupin moves a manipulator arm into position around a pencil-thin nuclear fuel rod. He is preparing for a procedure that he and his colleagues have practiced repeatedly in anticipation of this moment in the hot cell.
Thomas J. Downar, Jen-Ying Wu, John Steill, Raghunandan Janardhan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 117 | Number 2 | February 1997 | Pages 133-150
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35320
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-fidelity simulation of nuclear reactor accidents such as the rupture of a main steam line in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) requires three-dimensional core hydrodynamics modeling because of the strong effect channel cross flow has on reactor kinetics. A parallel nested Krylov linear solver was developed and implemented in the RETRAN-03 reactor systems analysis code to make such high-fidelity core modeling practical on engineering workstations. Domain decomposition techniques were also applied to the RETRAN-03 solution algorithm and demonstrated using a distributed memory parallel computer. Applications were performed for a four-loop Westinghouse PWR steam-line-break accident, and performance improvements of over a factor of 30 were achieved for models with 25 flow channels in the core. Larger models (e.g., 104-core channels), previously inaccessible because of memory limitations, were also solved with practical execution times.