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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
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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June 2024
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Latest News
G7 pledges support for nuclear at Italy meeting
The Group of Seven (G7) recommitted its support for nuclear energy in the countries that opt to use it at a Ministerial Meeting on Climate in Italy last month.
In a statement following the April meeting, the group committed to support multilateral efforts to strengthen the resilience of nuclear supply chains, referencing the goal set by 25 countries during last year’s COP28 climate conference in Dubai to triple global nuclear generating capacity by 2050.
R. C. Harvill, J. W. Lane, J. M. Link, S. W. Claybrook, T. L. George, T. Kindred
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 1 | January 2022 | Pages 70-99
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1884491
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE), which operated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1965 to 1969, was an experimental reactor that used UF4 fuel dissolved in molten fluoride salt. Criticality was achieved when the fuel salt mixture passed through the graphite-moderated core region. Therefore, because the fuel and fission products flowed through the system, delayed neutron precursors were not confined to the core, and decay heat was released outside the core, which is a unique challenge relative to more traditional reactor designs with solid fuel. Therefore, research and demonstration reactors such as MSRE have become a valuable source of information for benchmarking modeling and simulation tools for advanced reactor designs. One such tool being considered is GOTHIC, which is a coarse-grid computational fluid dynamics multiphysics software package. GOTHIC includes attributes and physical phenomena needed for modeling these advanced, non–light water reactor designs. For example, GOTHIC includes fluid property tables for various molten salts; a tracer-tracking module for modeling fission products and the radioactive decay and heat release by delayed neutron precursors locally in the fluid outside the core; and other necessary capabilities for modeling molten salt reactor (MSR) designs, including the ability to model dissolved gases. GOTHIC is used to benchmark steady-state and transient conditions from the MSRE. Zero-power physics testing included fuel salt pump start-up and coast-down transients with a control rod automatically moving to maintain criticality. The control rod motion calculated by GOTHIC is a reasonable match to measured data from these transients. Further, low-power testing included a natural convection transient with no control rod motion such that reactor power was responding to heat load demand from the radiator. The reactor power and fuel salt and coolant salt temperatures calculated by GOTHIC exhibit good agreement with measured data. These results confirm GOTHIC capabilities for modeling MSR designs with circulating fuel.