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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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Powering the future: How the DOE is fueling nuclear fuel cycle research and development
As global interest in nuclear energy surges, the United States must remain at the forefront of research and development to ensure national energy security, advance nuclear technologies, and promote international cooperation on safety and nonproliferation. A crucial step in achieving this is analyzing how funding and resources are allocated to better understand how to direct future research and development. The Department of Energy has spearheaded this effort by funding hundreds of research projects across the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). This initiative has empowered dozens of universities to collaborate toward a nuclear-friendly future.
Fred Cooper, John Dienes
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 68 | Number 3 | December 1978 | Pages 308-321
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A27308
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We investigate the growth of Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities following the deceleration of fuel by a less dense coolant using the method of generalized coordinates, which allows us to study the nonlinear, late-time aspects of the problem as well as the possibility of fuel freezing at the interface. We consider liquid coolant in contact with three possible states of fuel—pure liquid, pure solid, and liquid fuel freezing at the interface—and treat several acceleration mechanisms. Assuming the instability starts at a planar interface as a velocity perturbation proportional to the interfacial velocity, we find that when the fuel is completely frozen or freezing at the interface, instabilities will not grow unless the initial interfacial relative velocity satisfies a relationship of the form where υ0 is the initial relative velocity, ρf the density of the fuel, Y0 the yield strength of the frozen fuel, λ the wavelength of the instability, and L a characteristic length. The specific form of C depends on the acceleration mechanism and when freezing begins. For the case of UO2 and sodium, we follow the growth of the fastest growing wavelength instability for different acceleration mechanisms and determine the impulse needed for instabilities to grow when freezing is occurring at the interface.