ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Mauro Dalla Palma, Pierluigi Zaccaria
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 62 | Number 1 | July-August 2012 | Pages 122-128
PFC and FW Materials Technology | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials, Part A: Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A14123
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear high heat flux components (HHFCs) experience large thermal gradients and high heat flux variations, which induce severe thermal cyclic loadings. The most critical design issue for these components is their endurance strength under the required number of thermal cycles.The aim of this work is to provide procedures to perform the multiaxial creep-fatigue life assessment of HHFCs. Since the existing design codes present limitations due to simplifying assumptions concerning procedures for the multiaxial fatigue verification considering interactive effects of creep-fatigue and local stress and temperature conditions, better accurate verification methods and rules are developed starting from the available scientific literature and experimental data. The new verification methods identify the shape of the most damaging hysteresis loop considering plasticity and creep strains in both tensile and compressive conditions.The developed procedures are used to post-process the thermomechanical results of finite element (FE) analyses. They foresee the calculation of the creep-fatigue damage in each node and for each cyclic loading of the analyzed FE model by using the fatigue curve corresponding to the shape of the local hysteresis loop. Furthermore, the most fatigued elements are bounded and the causes of damage are identified to improve the local design. The fatigue damage is evaluated considering the effects of local conditions: temperature, multiaxial stress-strain state, strain intensity range, effect of local mean stresses, material shakedown, accumulated damage for multiple cyclic loads, combined effect of creep-fatigue, hold periods, and neutron flux.The developed procedures are successfully verified by comparing the results with experimental data for different levels of mean stress.This paper presents a description of the procedures and design rules focusing on the innovative aspects. The new procedures have been developed in the framework of the activities for the design, manufacturing, and procurement of the ITER neutral beam injector, and they are applied for creep-fatigue verifications of the in-vessel HHFCs.