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Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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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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Fusion Science and Technology
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Yuzhou Mao, Shuai Yuan, Yanping Zhao, Gen Chen, Lei Wang, Xu Deng, Diye Xue, Songqing Ju, Yan Cheng, R. Kumazawa, Shidong Wei
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 3 | April 2012 | Pages 216-226
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST61-216-226
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High radio frequency (rf) power amplifiers were designed as a part of research and development of an ion cyclotron range of frequency (ICRF) system that aimed at long-pulse operation at the megawatt level in a frequency range of 25 to 70 MHz. A study on the high-power amplifiers for ICRF heating in Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) is presented. To realize the design with a compact structure, a double coaxial cavity was employed as the output circuit of the final power amplifier (FPA) for tuning and matching, and the strip line was adopted for the input impedance matching circuit of the drive power amplifier (DPA). A double-stub tuner matching network with a variable-length U-link was used to obtain the impedance matching between the DPA and the FPA. To ensure the stable operation of the amplifiers, a grounded-grid configuration was chosen, and precautions were taken to suppress all parasitic oscillations of the anode output circuit. The rf power amplifiers performed successfully in stable operation at the megawatt level at each integer frequency from 25 to 70 MHz during the tests, and a rf power of 1.5 MW was achieved in a matching dummy load. The test results show a good agreement with the calculated values. The amplifiers operated reliably in long-pulse mode in EAST, and the total rf power of [approximately]1.8 MW was injected into plasmas in EAST ICRF heating experiments in the 2010 autumn campaign.