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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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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October 2025
Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
S. Gordeev, F. Gröschel, V. Heinzel, W. Hering, R. Stieglitz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 618-624
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-948
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
IFMIF (International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility) is an accelerator based deuteron-lithium (D-Li) neutron source to simulate the neutron irradiation field in a fusion reactor. The target assembly of the IFMIF consists of the flow conditioners and the nozzle, which has to form a stable lithium jet. This work focuses on a numerical study of the flow conditioner efficiency, in which two different types of flow conditioners are compared by means of a detailed numerical analysis with respect to specific hydraulic effects in the pipe elbow and the inflow conditioners. The adequateness of two modelling approaches - Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) - to simulate an unstable flow through a 90° bend of circular cross section has been examined. Both methods investigated exhibit a reasonable agreement with the experimental data, but the DES approach does not require a very fine grid resolution and is less time consuming. The further conducted numerical analysis of the flow conditioner uses a DES approach. The calculations show that a honeycomb-screen combination is not capable to suppress effectively large scale swirl motions emerging from the bend. A frequency analysis of the static pressure fluctuation reveals instabilities in the shear layer between the separation zone and the accelerated outer region, which additionally increase the inhomogeneity of the axial velocity distribution.
