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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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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Latest News
IEA report: Challenges need to be resolved to support global nuclear energy growth
The International Energy Agency published a new report this month outlining how continued innovation, government support, and new business models can unleash nuclear power expansion worldwide.
The Path to a New Era for Nuclear Energy report “reviews the status of nuclear energy around the world and explores risks related to policies, construction, and financing.”
Find the full report at IEA.org.
Mei-Ya Wang, Tsung-Kuang Yeh, Hong-Ming Liu, Min Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 174 | Number 2 | June 2013 | Pages 179-187
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-16
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Among the six types of Generation IV reactors, the supercritical water reactor (SCWR) is the only one that adopts light water as the reactor coolant. Different from the boiling, two-phase coolant in the core of a traditional boiling water reactor (BWR), the coolant in an SCWR would remain in one phase throughout the entire primary coolant circuit (PCC) due to its much higher operating temperature (>374°C) and pressure (>22.1 MPa). For a conventional BWR, the coolant is relatively oxidizing due to the presence of hydrogen peroxide and oxygen, directly or indirectly produced via water radiolysis. This outcome eventually leads to degradation of structural materials, primarily stress corrosion cracking. In an SCWR, the solubility of oxygen in the reactor coolant is extremely high. In the absence of the gas stripping effect in a single-phase coolant, worse degradation phenomena are expected to appear in the structural and core components. To ensure proper designs of the structural components and suitable selection of the materials to meet the requirements of operation safety, it would be of great assistance to the design engineers of an SCWR to be aware of the intrinsic state of water chemistry in the entire PCC. Since SCWRs are still at the stage of conceptual design and no practical data are available, a computer model was developed for determining the water chemistry variation and the corrosion behavior of metallic materials in the PCC of a conceptual SCWR. Radiolysis parameters used for calculating the concentrations of major redox species (i.e., [O2], [H2], and [H2O2]) in the reactor coolant were collected from literature reports. However, the lack of sufficient data necessitated that some were derived by extrapolation. Calculations indicated that the concentrations of the two major oxidizing species (H2O2 and O2) could become extremely high at locations inside or near the core, considerably higher than those in typical BWRs. It was therefore speculated that the structural materials in an SCWR may be exposed to an environment not only at a much higher temperature but also one that is more oxidizing than that in a conventional BWR.
