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.
Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
Han Zhang, Jiong Guo, Jianan Lu, Fu Li, Yunlin Xu, T. J. Downar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 190 | Number 2 | May 2018 | Pages 156-175
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1426299
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
TINTE is a well-established code for the pebble-bed high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTR), including the complicated nuclear module and thermal-hydraulic module, which has been validated by experiments and widely used in the transient behavior simulation. However, only an operator splitting scheme is employed in TINTE to couple the neutronics and thermal hydraulics, and some physical quantities are not consistent in time. As a result, the accuracy and stability are limited by the additional error term derived from the unconverged physical term. In this paper, a fully implicit coupling method was investigated in which the coupled nonlinear fields at each time step are converged using Picard iterations. A physics-based preconditioning is proposed in the work here to further improve the computational performance of the fully implicit coupling method. Seven test problems are implemented based on a practical engineering model, rather than a simple model, to evaluate the performance of the Picard method. The numerical results show that the fully implicit Picard iteration method is more accurate and more stable, which permits longer time steps and a reduction of the computational burden for solving the coupled field equations. The computational efficiency is further enhanced when the physics-based preconditioning is utilized.