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ANS hosts webinar on criticality safety standards
A diagram depicting the NRC’s regulatory structure for nuclear criticality safety. (Image: Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series last month. RP3C chair Steven Krahn opened the meeting with brief introductory remarks about the importance of risk-informed, performance based (RIPB) decision-making and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods.
Sierra A. Tutwiler, Trevor C. Franklin, Ryan P. McGuire, Dillon R. Shaver, Lane B. Carasik
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 81 | Number 6 | August 2025 | Pages 591-603
Regular Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2025.2463818
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the major components in fusion energy systems is the fusion blanket, which has a vacuum vessel to contain the plasma. As part of the fusion blanket/vacuum vessel, the first wall and plasma-facing components require sufficient cooling to prevent material degradation during operation from the superheated plasma. Most fusion blanket concepts involve first wall and divertor coolant channels with heat transfer enhancements (HTEs) that are intended to withstand the incident high heat fluxes of 1 to 5 MW/m2. Twisted tape inserts are a proposed HTE that have been investigated previously for first wall cooling and monoblock divertor cooling channels and in other nonfusion heat transfer components. By inserting twisted tapes into straight pipes, the amount of turbulence in the system can be increased at lower Reynolds numbers by swirling the flow. This results in better heat transfer characteristics with marginal increases in frictional pressure losses. In particular, simulations of high-Prandtl-number fluids such as the proposed molten salt FLiBe in twisted tapes, which is prototypic to liquid immersion blankets, have not been previously explored. In this study, we simulate various Prandtl numbers in pipes with twisted tape inserts using large eddy simulations to determine the effects of increasing Prandtl numbers on heat transfer performance. The quantities of particular interest are the Nusselt number and the friction factor, which were recovered using data reduction techniques to determine impacts on heat transfer and pressure losses. This work serves as a starting point for determining the feasibility of twisted tape inserts for liquid immersion blanket concepts.