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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2025
Nuclear Technology
September 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NNSA awards BWXT $1.5B defense fuels contract
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.
A. Froio, A. Bertinetti, B.-E. Ghidersa, F. A. Hernández, L. Savoldi, R. Zanino
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 5 | July 2019 | Pages 365-371
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1600348
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The European Union Demonstration Fusion Power Reactor (EU DEMO) is facing its preconceptual design phase. In this phase, the research and development activities make extensive use of computational tools, to, e.g., verify the design calculations or to perform parametric analyses aimed at optimization. The design of the breeding blanket (BB), which will be a first-of-a-kind component in EU DEMO, is supported from the thermal-hydraulic point of view by local three-dimensional (3-D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses, mainly aimed at verifying the heat removal capabilities of the system, and by analyses at the system level using one-dimensional (1-D) codes.
This work presents the development and application of a detailed 1-D model of the coolant manifolds for the helium-cooled pebble bed BB concept for EU DEMO. This model, implemented in the GEneral Tokamak THErmal-hydraulic Model (GETTHEM), allows fast analyses to be performed at the global level but still maintain a good level of detail concerning the coolant distribution. The first results obtained with the model prove that 3-D CFD analyses of the manifolds may provide misleading results due to nonrepresentative boundary conditions (BCs), which must be used to avoid having a domain that is too complex. The application of a global model, which is indeed characterized exploiting local analyses, can in turn provide better BCs to the detailed 3-D CFD analyses.