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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Challenge: Accelerate utilization of simulation and experimentation.
How: Integrate experimentation and simulation to enable the development of first principles predictive simulation capabilities that are necessary to transition nuclear energy system design and licensing from reliance on experiments to reliance on modeling and simulation.
Background: In the past half century, the nuclear energy industry and regulatory agency approach to nuclear system design and licensing has relied significantly on experimental testing. This conventional paradigm embraces conservative design principles and has ensured nuclear safety, but at the cost of extensive experiments required by the current licensing process to validate modeling and simulation tools currently in use for core design. Additionally, the lengthy and complex software quality assurance process required by the licensing authority prevents many from using newly-available models or tools, thus further delaying the use of new simulation tools that are closer to a true predictive capability. These two issues combined deter licensing authorities from trusting the predictive capabilities of software and increases the reliance on new experiments.
The challenge thus becomes to develop and improve versatile predictive simulation capabilities that can easily integrate new models without a lengthy re-qualification process, while designing and developing a set of broad, challenging, and well-instrumented experiments that can clearly demonstrate the predictive capability of the new simulation tools and identify the areas in which the tools need improvement. Significant computational challenges exist in quantifying the impact of uncertainties on nuclear reactor performance in a multiphysics context.
Software development standards have increased significantly over the years, but the quality assurance process remains uneven. Legacy codes have been grandfathered into the licensing regime, while new codes require a significant quality assurance process, dissuading attempts to integrate advancements. At the same time, experiments have become so cost-prohibitive that laboratories and industry rely on old experiments that often lack the detail and precision needed to validate advanced first principles simulation capabilities.
Addressing this challenge requires a greater trust in first principles modeling and simulation capabilities and the definition of simpler guidelines in the development of quality-assured software. Additionally, high-fidelity software should be used to design a set of broad critical experiments in order to gain support in the construction of such facilities. A new paradigm that closely integrates these experiments and predictive simulations for the design and licensing process is needed.
Last modified May 12, 2017, 1:23am CDT