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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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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
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Nobuyuki Kimura, Kenji Hayashi, Hideki Kamide, Masami Itoh, Tadashi Sekine
Nuclear Technology | Volume 152 | Number 2 | November 2005 | Pages 210-222
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-A3671
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An innovative sodium-cooled fast reactor has been investigated in a feasibility study of fast breeder reactor cycle systems in Japan. A compact reactor vessel and a column-type upper inner structure with a radial slit for an arm of a fuel-handling machine (FHM) are adopted. Dipped plates are set in the reactor vessel below the free surface to prevent gas entrainment. We performed a one-tenth-scaled model water experiment for the upper plenum of the reactor vessel. Gas entrainment was not observed in the experiment under the same velocity condition as the reactor. Three vortex cavitations were observed near the hot-leg inlet. A vertical rib on the reactor vessel wall was set to restrict the rotating flow near the hot leg. The vortex cavitation between the reactor vessel wall and the hot leg was suppressed by the rib under the same cavitation factor condition as in the reactor. The cylindrical plug was installed through the hole in the dipped plates for the FHM to reduce the flow toward the free surface. It was effective when the plug was submerged into the middle height in the upper plenum. This combination of two components had a possibility to optimize the flow in the compact reactor vessel.