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
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Jun 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2026
Nuclear Technology
July 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NRC proposes security regulation changes
In 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14300, “‘Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” which directs the NRC to conduct a sweeping, multifaceted overhaul of its structure, culture, and regulations with the aim of facilitating increased deployment of new nuclear technologies and capacity.
S. Siriano, A. Tassone, G. Caruso
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 144-158
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1858671
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid metals offer unique properties and their use in a nuclear fusion reactor, both as confined flows and free-surface flow, is widely studied in the fusion community. The interaction between this conductive fluid and the tokamak magnetic fields leads to magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) phenomena that influence the flow features. To properly design components that employ liquid metals, it is necessary to accurately predict these features, and although the efforts have been made in development, a mature code specifically customized to simulate MHD flows is still unavailable. In this work, the general purpose computational fluid dynamics code ANSYS CFX 18.2 is validated for MHD free-surface thin-film flow with insulated walls up to and for several values of the characteristic width/thickness ratio, comparing the results with the theoretical relation available in the literature. For all the cases considered, the maximum integral error is found to be below 10%. Successively, the validated code is used to investigate the MHD flow in a chute with a characteristic film ratio equal to 0.1 and for . Uniform and nonuniform wall electrical conductivity cases are considered with the latter modeled by placing on the side walls and on the back wall localized regions with different conductivity. The electrical conductivity of the back wall is found to have a negligible effect on the global flow when the lateral wall is insulated, similarly to what is observed for the analogous bounded flow. Contrariwise, an electrically conductive lateral wall is found to enhance the free-surface jet and to modify the Hartmann layer structure.