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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
Meeting Spotlight
Materials in Nuclear Energy Systems (MiNES 2023)
December 10–14, 2023
New Orleans, LA|New Orleans Marriott
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
December 2023
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2023
Latest News
DOE issues $19 million Community Capacity Building Grant Program FOA
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management released a competitive funding opportunity announcement (FOA) on December 6 for the Community Capacity Building Grant Program, aimed at communities affected by DOE-EM’s mission to clean up legacy nuclear waste.
Han Zhang, Peter Titus, Arthur Brooks, Joseph Petrella, Stefan Gerhardt, Dang Cai, Mark Smith, Feng Cai, Ankita Jariwala, Peter Dugan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 849-861
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1643687
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The NSTX-U recovery project will deploy new plasma-facing components (PFCs) to meet the updated high heat flux requirements, increased heating power, and longer pulse durations compared with NSTX. Many components have been redesigned and replaced. To address the influence of high heat load, heat transfer, and distribution in the whole machine, an ANSYS two-dimensional (2-D) model was built for the global thermal analysis of NSTX-U recovery. This 2-D model includes most of the aspects of the updated design of the center stack casing first wall, new inboard divertor and cooling plate, updated outboard divertor, etc. It models the radiative surfaces of almost all the in-vessel components, vessel, insulation, and cooled coils. It models the convection heat exchange on all the out-of-vessel components and environment. Thee water cooling of coils, casing, and vessel, and helium heating and cooling of PFCs are included, too. Heat loads of normal operation are from the plasma energy deposition of five predefined typical thermal scenarios. Heat sources for bakeout are from Joule heat generation, helium gas, and hot water heating.
The results of this global model are used to predict temperature ratcheting and heat distribution of different thermal scenarios, to understand heat transfer and heat removal for bakeout, to evaluate different cooling schemes for operation and heating schemes for bakeout, and to estimate heat loads to the cooling system of the Ohmic heating and Poroidal field coils, heat loss from the system, etc. The temperature and heat flux results are also used as the base and comparison for the detailed thermal analyses of the substructures. This global model is also being converted to a structural model to evaluate thermal growth and thermal stresses. Thermal loads can be mapped to detailed three-dimensional structural models and combined with electromagnetic loads to evaluate different component designs.